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posted by takyon on Monday November 06 2017, @05:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the southwestworld dept.

At various resorts in Mexico, multiple tourists have claimed to have been sexually assaulted, served spiked drinks that caused blackouts, or that the resorts refused to call police. However, TripAdvisor has been removing negative reviews written by these people:

Since July, when the Journal Sentinel began investigating the mysterious death of a Wisconsin college student in Mexico — and found widespread problems with tainted alcohol, derelict law enforcement and price gouging from hospitals — more than a dozen travelers from across the country have said TripAdvisor muzzled their first-hand stories of blackouts, rapes and other ways they were injured while vacationing in Mexico.

[...] The company's policies and practices obscure the public's ability to fully evaluate the information on its site. Secret algorithms determine which hotels and resorts appear when consumers search. Some hotels pay TripAdvisor when travelers click on their links; some pay commissions when tourists book or travel.

An untold number of TripAdvisor users have been granted special privileges, including the ability to delete forum posts. But the company won't disclose how those users are selected.

takyon: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the story (broader investigation here). TripAdvisor has apologized for at least one forum post removal and has restored a deleted account of rape at an Iberostar resort in Riviera Maya, Mexico. They evidently had no difficulty in restoring a deleted forum post written in 2010.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @09:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @09:17AM (#592943)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TripAdvisor#Controversy_and_fraudulent_reviews [wikipedia.org]

    Same problems as with other such sites. All of this is in Source Criticism 101...

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