SAOUD KHALIFAH

is founder and CEO of Fakespot.com, a site that filters product reviews to find out what real users are saying

You have to approach reviews with a lot of scepticism. Unfortunately, as e-commerce grows, more people engage in aggressive marketing tactics such as buying fake reviews to increase sales. Online reviews are extremely important: you can’t window-shop an internet product and you can’t teleport to a hotel to see if it’s any good. The whole basis for your decision is the reviews.

On e-commerce platforms, the more positive reviews you have, the higher your ranking becomes. Sellers understand this and they know they need to increase that ranking to compete with others. Competitors trash each other’s products to take down the ranking. And sellers buy reviews to improve their ranking. It’s a constant battle to get that number one spot.

But there’s a lot of misleading information out there. Our analysis for platforms such as Amazon, Tripadvisor and Yelp shows that some 30 per cent of online reviews are dubious or inauthentic. In the hospitality industry, say a bed-and-breakfast place in the English countryside, it’s highly likely that they will buy a number of fake reviews to add to the real ones. In that category, you would see that fake figure rise to between 60 and 70 per cent. Fake reviews used to be sporadic. Now, there’s this huge ocean of data and there’s only a tiny sea that is truly authentic.

If you’re buying anything of high value, the onus is on you to do much more in-depth research. The most trustworthy online reviews are for restaurants. The worst are of service contractors such as plumbers. In New York City, the business service category with the most frequently faked reviews was hair salons and barbershops. We’ve received many fake reviews about our own apps and plug-in — there were people trashing us. They were usually sellers that we’ve actually exposed as untrustworthy.

It’s a very difficult problem, and it will take a lot of coordination with the government and consumer protection organizations to put pressure on the platforms. Our solution to the problem is to use the best technology available to detect bias. The government could put legislation into effect, but there will always be ways around it. And there’s also freedom of speech. Social media has the same problem. And the problem is only getting bigger.

“You have to approach reviews with a lot of scepticism” Saoud Khalifah