Commentary

Cracking Down on Fake Reviews

One of the big complaints about the confluence of social media and e-commerce is the potential for companies to try to game the system by stacking business profiles on sites like Yelp with fake reviews -- including unfounded positive reviews for their own companies, and malicious critical reviews of competitors. Inevitably, this has given rise to a whole new branch of online security, aiming to sniff out the fake comments.

This week brought news that four students from Cornell University have created software to identify fake online hotel reviews (okay, I admit I have an ulterior motive in writing about this: Cornell is in my hometown of Ithaca). The Cornell project brought together three computer science students and a communications major, who described their efforts to combat "opinion spam" in a report titled "Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination."  

Overall the Cornellians claim their software is able to spot fake reviews 90% of the time, versus just 50% for human subjects, focusing on fake positive reviews and irrelevant comments which, say, post links to other Web sites for promotional purposes. With this focus in mind, the authors say roughly half of all online hotel reviews are fake -- four times the proportion guessed by human subjects (who estimated fake reviews as 12% of all reviews).

Unsurprisingly, one of the key giveaways for fake (and real) reviews is word choice, and the project uncovered some interesting trends here. For example, you are more likely to find words like "hotel," "my," "experience," "vacation," and the names of cities in fake reviews. Meanwhile real reviews were more likely to contain words like "floor," "bathroom," "small," and the "$" sign. Of course, now that the fake review writers know this, they can populate their bogus comments with these "authentic" words. Just be on your guard if you see a review that says "Great floor! Loved the small bathroom!  $!"

1 comment about "Cracking Down on Fake Reviews".
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  1. Lisa Leverich from Tec Labs, August 9, 2011 at 4:24 p.m.

    Don't forget about fake negative reviews too. We've spotted competitors who have posted fake negative reviews in the attempt to take business away. Fortunately our products are well loved and they get a flurry of comments defending our products back at them, not to say we never get negative comments of course. You can't make everyone happy all the time. Fake negative reviews can be damaging to your reputation and they need to be snuffed out too. You can usually spot those by the fact that they know a little too much about the competitors product that you should have used instead.

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