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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.
(Score: 5, Touché) by bradley13 on Monday November 06 2017, @08:21AM (5 children)
TripAdvisor has a serious problem. Actually several problems.
On the one hand, some customers are just horrible. They will write a 1-star review because your waiter was too tall, or their favorite table was already occupied, or maybe just because it was a Tuesday. It is right and proper for idiotic reviews to be deleted. Given how sexually up-tight Americans are, it is entirely possible for some customer to claim to have been assaulted, because a waiter helped them on with their coat and accidentally touched them. Absolutely possible, even believable.
On the other hand, if someone is reporting genuine abuse, assault, even rape (and especially if this was reported to the police), deleting a review that might have warned other victims is not only horrible: (IANAL) I suspect that TripAdvisor can be held partially liable for the assaults that they partially enabled.
As elsewhere: the only real answer is for sites to never censor. If idiots post, let them. Remove content that is provably illegal, and even then only if someone complains. Otherwise, don't intervene, because once you start curating comments, you assume a responsibility that you can never actually meet. Ultimately, I think this will bring down even big sites like Facebook - they should never have started deciding what content is acceptable, and what isn't.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @08:28AM (2 children)
You must take Internet reviews with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, everybody has nitpicking reviews with negative reviews, and the owner that post ultrapositive fake reviews. But that happens to everybody, so the average is unaffected. If hotel A has 200 reviews and 4 stars and hotel B has 200 reviews and 2 stars. The aftermath is that A is better than B, because both have the average of exaggerated positives and false reviews, the remaining are the useful reviews.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @01:51PM (1 child)
These days, it is not appropriate to assume that these effects will average-out. Many companies are buying thousands of fake reviews (not just 1 or 5 stars, either).
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday November 07 2017, @04:28AM
Sucks for them, I only read the 1 star reviews
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Monday November 06 2017, @08:49AM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @01:43PM
Perhaps their terms of service say that they remove bad reviews that are contrary to their business goals.
If a lawyer could show that a subsequent attack was enabled by their removal of a warning,
and they had reason to encourage and know about it, then maybe it isn't so grey.
This is an interesting you're not the customer, you are the product case.
Since it is funded by bookings, it isn't a free service.
Does this give them a duty to at least try to provide a safe service?
The current Wild West Internet funding model depends on the answer.
The most likely outcome is a nice news splash followed by a quiet settlement and business as usual.