The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently announced new rules that clamp down on fake reviews and testimonials. Could the “product review industry” take a leaf out of the finance industry to help end the scourge of fake reviews, and themselves avoid getting fined by regulators?
Fake reviews really p*ss me off. It makes objective buying incredibly difficult when you know that huge numbers of sellers on marketplaces like Amazon are basically gaming the system.
It is not easy to detect fake reviews and they make “sort by review rating” on marketplaces almost completely pointless. Ordinary consumers, who don’t have the benefit of my cynicism-tinted glasses, are being cheated when they buy products on the basis of fake reviews.
So does industry - by which I mean businesses that host user-generate reviews - really care?
It seems so - in 2023 the “Coalition for Trusted Reviews” was created. Its members include Amazon, Glassdoor, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot and Booking.com and their website states that they are committed to “safeguarding and promoting trustworthy consumer reviews worldwide.”
The coalition focuses on the following four initiatives:
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Industry Alignment
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Best Practice Sharing
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Bad Actor Intelligence
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Advocacy
It’s on the Bad Actor Intelligence point, that I believe the review industry could learn something specific from the finance industry.
One of the key foundations underpinning the finance industry is data sharing via credit bureaus. Take out a personal loan, and your local credit bureaus will soon know about it. Miss a payment on your car finance, and your credit report will reflect that missed payment. Apply for a mortgage, and your credit score will be checked as part of the process.
Allowing your data (which is usually a requirement to even apply for finance) to be shared with credit bureaus is a key foundation of the finance industry allowing financial institutions to trust that the individuals to whom they lend money are able to make their repayments.
Qlarifi and Infact are two companies disrupting the traditional credit bureau industry by sourcing and providing credit data in real-time for financial services companies. I believe there is an opportunity for someone to create a real-time “review bureau” for consumer review data.
Companies like Trustpilot already invest significant amounts of money into detecting fake reviews. A reviews bureau would allow them to share details of bad actors in real time with a central authority. Before a new sign-up or customer has even written a review on any coalition member platform, a quick search of the review bureau would tell you whether this person has previously created suspicious or fake reviews with other members.
If this bad actor had managed to publish multiple reviews that are later shown to be fake, these would be linked together by the review bureau, giving a clear picture to all coalition members that this individual’s reviews should not be published. In particular, this approach could stop companies whose business model is purely to provide “fake review services” to retailers desperate to improve their review ratings.
Ideally such a review bureau would also (with explicit opt-in) share data about genuine reviews*, just as credit bureaus contain data about the vast majority of people who pay on time, not just delinquent payers. That way review hosting companies would not just know who should not be trusted, but those reviewers who are especially trustworthy.
Such a review bureau would need to be run by a trusted 3rd party - perhaps an existing credit bureau, such as Regis24 as they also use real-time identity resolution technology, which could easily be adapted for this use case.
Imagine reading reviews on Amazon knowing that they had weeded out all the fake, astroturf reviews? Imagine browsing Tripadvisor, knowing that restaurant reviews were not all by the restaurant owners’ mates. It would be glorious and significantly improve the trustworthiness of all these platforms to the benefit of consumers, who would no longer be duped.
I’m sure these coalition members would have wanted to tackle fake reviews anyway, but thanks to the FTC they now have a healthy financial incentive to do so - that is, avoiding fines for non-compliance. Who says regulators don’t do anything useful?
*N.B. each individual review hosting company could use their own real-time identity resolution system to detect duplicate review account creators, without sharing data to a central authority.
