What Can We Do About Fake Reviews?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2018
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you have ever bought something in an online shop or been to a restaurant, chances are you’ve read a review for it, apparently written by a customer. And chances are you’ve also spotted more than a few suspicions ones, which stand out for their unqualified and lavish praise while being unusually free of personal details, or perhaps because they appear as a diatribe of awfulness designed to put you off forever. Who wrote those? In fact, there's a whole industry surrounding fake reviews - and it matters because more and more of us are buying things online and relying on other people's online advice to make the right choice. Freelance journalist Oobah Butler talks to us about his entire fake restaurant in London, James Kay, at review site Tripadvisor, tells us how they try to weed out inventions such as Oobah’s and brand reputation consultant Simon Wadsworth lays on tips for consumers and businesses.
(Picture: Customer review rating. Credit: Getty)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. |
| 0:09.5 | Coming up, the business of fake online reviews. |
| 0:12.9 | I know the companies that have come into us in a dire state, you know, where it's really started to affect the business. |
| 0:17.9 | And some of these businesses are household names. |
| 0:20.3 | How online reviews can make or break a company's reputation. Online is now informing what is going |
| 0:26.3 | on in the real world. This is what the experiment proved. People ate ready meals and because |
| 0:30.5 | it said it was great on the trip advisor, they thought it was great. So how are businesses fighting back? |
| 0:35.4 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:40.5 | Not so long ago, I bought a pair of Apple earphones on Amazon. Half the product reviews on the website |
| 0:46.4 | told me the earphones were not the genuine article. The other half waxed lyrical about how |
| 0:51.5 | brilliant and genuine they were. I bought them because, after all, |
| 0:55.2 | they were very cheap. And needless to say, two weeks after I got them, they fell apart. |
| 1:00.1 | More fool me. Except that the experience encapsulate a pernicious problem for online retailers, |
| 1:05.9 | namely fake reviews. In fact, there's a whole industry surrounding fake reviews, |
| 1:10.7 | and it matters because |
| 1:11.6 | more and more of us are buying stuff online and relying on other people's online advice to make |
| 1:17.0 | the right choice. When I'm looking to buy something on Amazon or on a website like that, I will |
| 1:22.2 | look at the most highly reviewed item. Yeah, I will use that as an indication of what to buy. |
| 1:27.1 | I use them quite a lot whenever I purchase a product and I like to compare things a lot, |
| 1:31.8 | especially when I buy electronic things. |
| 1:33.8 | I often look at what people have thought about the product. |
| 1:36.8 | I do quite a lot of shopping on Amazon and I'm often very interested to see what people think |
... |
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