Online reviews are an important tool to scrutinise shopping these days. The emerging problem is, some companies hire people to create and post fake reviews on an industrial scale. An investigation by Guardian last year revealed that many companies and products are hiring people to write fake reviews and promote their products. Another threat is to pay for bad reviews related to competition and other similar products. Amazon and Yelp claim to fight this menace by building their community and identifying such companies. Amazon has this good feature of knowing that the person who is writing the review has actually bought or used the product. I think, this is one of the best way to ensure genuine reviews but the problem still persists on general review websites. As a consumer, what we need to do is, to consult well known publishers or try to point out fake reviews by their language, user history and things like that.
Edit: This year in Sep. (2016), I attended a summer school called SNSPT, social networks, security, privacy and trust. I got an opportunity to see many people are doing research to deal with the problem of fake reviews. Mostly they are using machine learning techniques and pattern matching to detect fake reviews. But still it is an open and interesting problem.
Edit: This year in Sep. (2016), I attended a summer school called SNSPT, social networks, security, privacy and trust. I got an opportunity to see many people are doing research to deal with the problem of fake reviews. Mostly they are using machine learning techniques and pattern matching to detect fake reviews. But still it is an open and interesting problem.
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