According to the most recent transparency report from the travel company, Tripadvisor removed or rejected nearly one million fake reviews from its platform in 2020 and identified a swathe of new sites selling bogus reviews. This highlights the ongoing efforts by technology platforms as they fight to protect users from an onslaught of phony reviews.
According to the website, approximately 943,205 reviews that were submitted to Tripadvisor in 2020 were found to be fraudulent, representing 3.6% of all reviews that were submitted. Of these reviews, two-thirds were discovered before being posted to the platform.
More than two million reviews were rejected or removed from Tripadvisor's website (8.6% of the total) for a variety of reasons, including fraud or bias (39.7% of the total), violating community standards (48.3% of the total), and administrative reasons (12%), such as a business closing or a reviewer removing a review themselves.
The vast majority of fake reviews (93%) are eliminated due to positive bias; for example, when somebody is connected to a business or has been offered incentives to review it. The remaining fake reviews are either intentionally malicious (3%), or paid for (4%).
Tripadvisor stated that it removed paid reviews from approximately 131 countries in 2020 and discovered an increase in paid reviews originating in India, despite the fact that these reviews did not necessarily review properties located in India. India was the country that generated the most fake reviews in the previous year.
According to the most recent transparency report from the travel company, Tripadvisor removed or rejected nearly one million fake reviews from its platform in 2020 and identified a swathe of new sites selling bogus reviews. This highlights the ongoing efforts by technology platforms as they fight to protect users from an onslaught of phony reviews.
According to the website, approximately 943,205 reviews that were submitted to Tripadvisor in 2020 were found to be fraudulent, representing 3.6% of all reviews that were submitted. Of these reviews, two-thirds were discovered before being posted to the platform.
More than two million reviews were rejected or removed from Tripadvisor's website (8.6% of the total) for a variety of reasons, including fraud or bias (39.7% of the total), violating community standards (48.3% of the total), and administrative reasons (12%), such as a business closing or a reviewer removing a review themselves.
The vast majority of fake reviews (93%) are eliminated due to positive bias; for example, when somebody is connected to a business or has been offered incentives to review it. The remaining fake reviews are either intentionally malicious (3%), or paid for (4%).
Tripadvisor stated that it removed paid reviews from approximately 131 countries in 2020 and discovered an increase in paid reviews originating in India, despite the fact that these reviews did not necessarily review properties located in India. India was the country that generated the most fake reviews in the previous year.
According to Tripadvisor, the nine countries that produced the most fake reviews in 2020 were Germany, Brazil, the United States of America, Pakistan, Greece, Argentina, Bangladesh, and Turkey. India was not one of those countries.
Tripadvisor has stated that it identified approximately 65 new paid review sites in 2020, that it penalized approximately 34,605 properties for fraudulent activity, and that it banned approximately 20,299 members for failing to follow community standards. Paid reviews and fraudulent reviews are an ongoing problem for Tripadvisor.
26 million. This is the total number of reviews that were submitted to Tripadvisor in the year 2020: 12 million reviews were submitted for restaurants, 8 million reviews were submitted for hotels, and 4 million reviews were submitted for experiences, attractions, and activities. The vast majority of reviews were provided regarding user experiences in Europe (54.1%), followed by North America (23.5%), and Asia and the South Pacific (13.7%). Even while there are significantly less reviews overall than there were before the epidemic (66 million in 2018), the percentage of fraudulent reviews is significantly higher. In 2018, Tripadvisor reported that 2.1% of its reviews contained inaccurate information.
Many customers base their purchasing decisions on what they read in online reviews, and they do so even before they pull out their credit card. Due to the significance of reviews, an enormous underground economy has grown up around the practice of artificially boosting or lowering the rankings of competitors' listings by writing phony reviews. Amazon, Google, Facebook, and eBay are just some of the major tech platforms that have pledged to take action against the problem, and some of them are already facing regulatory action because of it. It is difficult to obtain trustworthy statistics regarding the precise prevalence of false reviews, and the numbers that are promoted by the industry are frequently significantly lower than the estimates provided by consumer groups and academics.
More than 250,000 more reviews relating to Covid-19 travel difficulties were carefully vetted by Tripadvisor. About 18% of these, or about 46,000, were removed because they violated the guidelines in some way, such as encouraging people to ignore government restrictions, criticizing businesses for closing as a response to lockdown measures, or using language that was racially problematic to describe the coronavirus.
Hart, R. (2022). Last year, Tripadvisor removed close to one million fake reviews from its site. This information was retrieved on August 15, 2022, from the following website: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/10/27/tripadvisor-took-down-nearly-1-million-fake-reviews-last-year/amp/.