SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the how-many-liars-how-many-tales dept.
New Research Exposes the Pervasive Practice of Fake Online Product Reviews:
Can you really trust that online product review before you make a purchase decision? New research has found that the practice of faking online product reviews may be more pervasive than you think.
According to researchers, a wide array of product marketers actually purchases fake online reviews through an online marketplace found through social media. As a result, marketers receive many reviews and high-average ratings on e-commerce sites that include Amazon, Walmart and Wayfair, among others.
[...] Here's how it works: Sellers post in private online groups to promote their products. They then pay customers to purchase certain products and leave positive reviews. These social media groups exist for a number of online retailers.
[...] To conduct their research, the study authors built a sample of approximately 1,500 products that were observed soliciting fake reviews over a nine-month period. The researchers found that the types of products involved represented many categories. They then tracked the outcomes of these products before and after the buying of fake reviews, and were able to document how the platform, in this case Amazon, regulates fake reviews.
"For the products in our research observed buying fake reviews, roughly half of their reviews were eventually deleted, but the deletions occurred with an average lag of over 100 days, allowing sellers to benefit from the short-term boost in ratings, reviews and sales," says Proserpio. "Almost none of the sellers purchasing fake reviews were well-known brands. This is consistent with other research that has shown online reviews are more effective and more critical to smaller, lesser-known brands."
Journal Reference:
Sherry He, Brett Hollenbeck, Davide Proserpio, The Market for Fake Reviews, Market Sci, 2022. DOI: 10.1287/mksc.2022.1353
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2022, @02:15AM
I can see you reasoning. I don't really care too much to write reviews, but in the half dozen or so that I did, I only wrote 5-star ones because I didn't have any interest in writing any for "meh" items, and I didn't get anything that was 1-star worthy. If I wrote any these days, I'd probably sound like the paid reviewers.
I also don't trust any "badged" reviewers. Maybe its unfair, but if you've written 500 reviews for mostly mundane stuff, I can't help but question your thoroughness or integrity. I generally ignore those posts, at least maybe until that time where I start seeing a bunch of 1-star reviews that say "I was sent this item to give my honest opinion and I think it is a load of crap."