{"id":25151,"date":"2018-08-09T14:09:32","date_gmt":"2018-08-09T14:09:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/?p=25151"},"modified":"2018-08-09T14:09:32","modified_gmt":"2018-08-09T14:09:32","slug":"the-never-ending-war-on-fake-reviews-by-simon-parkin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/the-never-ending-war-on-fake-reviews-by-simon-parkin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Never-Ending War on Fake Reviews (By Simon Parkin)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cTedious and helpless prose\u201d is how, in 1881, a writer for The Atlantic<\/em>described<\/a> \u201cLeaves of Grass,\u201d Walt Whitman\u2019s first volume of poetry. It was a view shared by other contemporary critics. One called the book<\/a> \u201cintensely vulgar, nay, absolutely beastly,\u201d before bluntly refusing to tell readers where it might be bought. Whitman did not idly nurse his wounds. Instead, he anonymously wrote numerous flattering appraisals of his work, to even the balance. A three-thousand-word example<\/a>, published in the September, 1855, edition of the United States Review<\/em>, opens with the breathless declaration, \u201cAn American bard at last!\u201d Whitman goes on to extravagantly applaud his dress sense (\u201cmanly and free\u201d), his posture (\u201cstrong and erect\u201d), his voice (\u201cbringing hope and prophecy to the generous races of young and old\u201d), and his compassion (\u201cthe largest lover and sympathizer that has appeared in literature.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The temptation to pose as an impartial reviewer of one\u2019s own work will be familiar to many authors across history. But the Internet has, as with all vices, smoothed the transition from temptation to action. When presented with the user-review box on Amazon, it\u2019s a simple matter for an author to tap on the five-star icon and offer an \u201cExquisite\u201d or a \u201cTriumph!\u201d For those caught in the act, the humiliation can be severe. In 2012, the crime writer R. J. Ellory was accused on Twitter by one of his rivals, Jeremy Duns, of writing \u201clong, purple tributes to his own work on Amazon.\u201d Under the pseudonym Nicodemus Jones, Duns said, Ellory had described his book \u201cA Quiet Belief in Angels<\/a>\u201d as \u201cmagnificent\u201d and \u201cpoetic,\u201d even going so far as to warn potential buyers to \u201cignore all dissenters and naysayers.\u201d Ellory, Duns claimed, had not stopped at self-praise; he had also posted negative reviews of other authors\u2019 work. In a statement issued to the Guardian<\/em><\/a>, Ellory admitted guilt. \u201cThe recent reviews\u2014both positive and negative\u2014that have been posted on my Amazon accounts are my responsibility and my responsibility alone,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI wholeheartedly regret the lapse of judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sock-puppeting, the act of posing as someone else on the Internet to artificially amplify a viewpoint, is, many writers claim, rife in publishing. The author Stephen Leather once reportedly admitted, at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, to building an online \u201cnetwork of characters\u201d who would talk among themselves about his books in glittering terms.<\/p>\n

Outside the publishing industry, the practice known as \u201creview brushing\u201d exists on a vast, industrial scale. In 2014, Haitao Xu, a thirty-year-old researcher now at Northwestern University, monitored five black-market Internet boards where companies and individuals advertise jobs posting positive reviews of their products and services, along with negative ones on those of their rivals. In just two months, Xu saw more than eleven thousand unique sellers post close to a quarter of a million jobs, paid at anywhere between \u201ctens of cents, up to five dollars,\u201d he told me. Since consumers typically see positive customer reviews as a more reliable indicator of quality than advertising, the effects can be major. \u201cStores using brushing services can increase their reputation ten times faster than normal seller stores,\u201d Xu, who, in 2016, spent six months working in Alibaba\u2019s fraud-detection team, told me. \u201cA store with a high reputation is displayed higher up a Web page, attracting more customers and increasing sales.\u201d Online sellers who do not employ brushing services, meanwhile, often find their products overlooked.<\/p>\n

Late last year, Oobah Butler, a reporter at Vice, decided to test the effectiveness of brushing in restaurant reviews<\/a>. Years ago, Butler told me, he used to write bogus reviews on TripAdvisor for money. He found his clients via freelance job postings, like those that Xu studied, and charged around twenty dollars a pop. \u201cI\u2019d look at the menu, pick something, and start lying,\u201d he said. For the recent test, he created his own fake business, which he called the Shed at Dulwich. (It was named for his garden shed, in Dulwich, London.) He photographed plates of carefully arranged food (created using household products such as shaving cream and dishwasher tablets), bought a burner phone, and added the Shed to the site. Within four weeks, he had posted enough fake reviews to move the spectral establishment into the top two thousand restaurants in London. Eventually, it became the highest-rated restaurant in the city, and Butler was fielding scores of calls from people hoping to book a table. Such was the nonexistent restaurant\u2019s success that it even attracted a one-star review, from what Butler assumes was a rival. \u201cTripAdvisor removed the review on the grounds that it was fake,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

For online retailers, the war on the fake-review industry is now a major part of the business. Today, when a review is submitted to TripAdvisor, it goes through a tracking system that examines hundreds of different attributes, from basic data points, such as the I.P. address of the reviewer, to more detailed information, such as the screen resolution of the device that was used to submit the review. \u201cWe use this data to create a map of reviews coming in for every property listed on the site, and it means we can quickly identify unusual patterns of review behavior,\u201d James Kay, a spokesman for the company, told me. The tools, he said, have successfully identified offshore review farms. In 2015, TripAdvisor took legal action against sixty of them.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, fake reviews are being leveraged not only for financial gain but to make a political point. Within hours of the release of Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign memoir, \u201cWhat Happened<\/a>,\u201d last September, so many people had left one-star ratings on Amazon that the company deleted almost a thousand reviews<\/a>. The same month, the San Francisco-based video-game company Campo Santo saw one of its titles, Firewatch<\/a>, review-bombed on Amazon, Steam, and other sites. The campaign started after the Swedish YouTube broadcaster Felix Kjellberg, a.k.a. PewDiePie<\/a>, posted a video in which he used a racial epithet. Campo Santo filed a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, preventing PewDiePie from streaming any of its games; that was enough to mobilize a small army of fake reviewers looking to punish the developer.<\/p>\n

An Amazon spokeswoman explained that when a product is hit with many reviews in a short period of time, the company\u2019s systems will automatically suppress all but \u201cverified\u201d purchases. But this preventative measure, too, can be easily gamed. \u201cPeople would buy our game, not play it, leave the terrible review, and instantly request a refund,\u201d Sean Vanaman, Campo Santo\u2019s co-founder, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s a well-worn tactic.\u201d In his estimation, user-review systems such as those used by Valve, Steam\u2019s developer, are so vulnerable to exploitation that they require as much moderation as social-media platforms. \u201cThe ethics and utility of these systems boil down to this: if a platform is going to have it, they have to be able to manage it to protect people from abuse and harassment, or they become responsible for that abuse,\u201d Vanaman told me last September. (His studio, Campo Santo, was bought by Valve earlier this year.)<\/p>\n

Butler, the reporter who created the fake restaurant on TripAdvisor, is skeptical that the war on fake reviews is being won. \u201cPut it this way: I\u2019m still not banned from TripAdvisor,\u201d he said. Kay, the company\u2019s spokesman, claims that the Shed at Dulwich was identified as fraudulent and removed from the site completely before Butler published the story about his escapade. Butler remains unconvinced. \u201cOne way or another, the platform needs to be more sophisticated if we\u2019re going to trust it more than what\u2019s in front of our eyes,\u201d he said.”<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/tech\/elements\/the-never-ending-war-on-fake-reviews<\/p>\n

Simon Parkin is a contributing writer for newyorker.com. He is the author of \u201cDeath by Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline<\/a>,\u201d and has written essays and articles for various publications, including the Guardian<\/em>, the Times<\/em>, the M.I.T. Technology Review<\/em>, and the New Statesman<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTedious and helpless prose\u201d is how, in 1881, a writer for The Atlanticdescribed \u201cLeaves of Grass,\u201d Walt Whitman\u2019s first volume of poetry. It was a view shared by other contemporary critics. One called the book \u201cintensely vulgar, nay, absolutely beastly,\u201d before bluntly refusing to tell readers where it might be bought. Whitman did not idly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,16],"tags":[30,27],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25151"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25152,"href":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25151\/revisions\/25152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}