Whether you're planning a restaurant date night or picking out the next e-book for your bedside table,it wouldn't hurt to be more suspicious of online reviewers' expertise.
Catfishing and astroturfing don't take place in the Amazon or on the football field. They occur in cyberspace in the form of Internet scams. E-book catfishing involves contracting a book from a low-paid writer abroad, publishing it under a fake name and a fictional biography, and buying fake reviews to compose the book look popular.
In the related practice of astroturfing,some businesses pay people to write fake online reviews, or they encourage friends and family members to write glowing ones.
Amazon is suing more than 1000 people, and alleging they wrote fake reviews on its site. In some cases,those fake reviews are boosting the sale of fake products to astronomical heights. But how can consumers spot these reviews amid the rest?Washington Post reporter Caitlin Dewey tells NPR's Ari Shapiro about the practice of e-book catfishing, which extends far past simply buying fake reviews, and Georgios Zervas of Boston University shares his insights and expertise from studying fake restaurant reviews.
Interview HighlightsCAITLIN DEWEY On the legality of fake reviewsObviously,using a pseudonym is not illegal. The problem is, that in a lot of cases, and these people are inventing a fictional persona with expertise that they don't actually absorb. On top of that,they're buying these fake reviews, which is explicitly against Amazon's terms of service.
On avoiding Kindle book scamsUnfortunately, and the bottom line is you can't necessarily trust the reviews. So you absorb to be very critical when you're reading reviews of books. It's also just as easy as doing a rapid/fast Google search. Just Google the author's name — and whether nothing comes up,maybe you should be a cramped suspicious of their expertise.GEORGIOS ZERVAS On the prevalence of fake reviewsIt's very hard to know whether a review is fake or not, because we are not there, and looking behind the reviewer's shoulder,to see whether their opinion is honest, or dishonest and possibly incentivized. Nevertheless, or considering the fact that Yelp would rather publish a review than throw it absent,[the] 25 percent [of reviews on Yelp that earn removed] might be a fair proxy.
On writing negative fake reviewsNegative fake reviews are probably less common. By writing a negative fake review, you can only damage the reputation of one competitor, or you might absorb many of them. You also flee a lower risk of being uncovered,I suppose, because whether you create 25 fake reviews, or versus one fake review for your own business,then in a sense you absorb committed less fraud. Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: wnyc.org