When I traveled two weeks ago in a Western town I had never visited before, I relied on the Internet to find a sports bar where I could watch the Yankees on a nice big flat screen while having some good, simple food. I found a great sports bar on a consumer review website, and I had a relaxing evening, even though I was not really sure where I was (the GPS in my car knew it though).
That was because the online review I had read and relied upon was probably written by a real satisfied customer of that restaurant.
But what if the restaurant had paid a third party to write fake (gloating) reviews about the establishment in order to lure unsuspected customers like me to come in?
There is a name for that practice, astroturfing, and astrotrufing is illegal, as it violates laws against false advertising and is considered an illegal and deceptive business practice.
On September 23, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced that 19 companies have agreed to stop writing fake online reviews and to pay more than $350,000 in penalties. The NY AG named this undercover investigation “Operation Clean Turf.”
There are many sites on the web whose business model is to provide a platform for crowd-sourced information. Among the most popular of these sites are Yelp, CitySearch, and Google, which have collaborated with AG Schneiderman on the “Clean Turf Investigation.”
The NY AG Office started noticing about a year ago a flux of suspicious online reviews. This led undercover investigators, posing as owners of a yogurt shop in Brooklyn, asking several companies to provide fake positive online reviews for that shop. Many of the companies contacted were happy to help and offered fake review services. Most of these reviews are written by freelancers from all around the world, who post comments about places and businesses they do not know about. The NY AG Office found during its investigation that freelance writers from the Philippines, Bangladesh, or Eastern Europe were paid $1 to $10 per review.
This practice is a concern for consumer review websites, as astroturfing threatens their very business model, which relies on their visitors to trust the legitimacy of their online reviews. An article written by Professor Michael Luca (Harvard Business School) and Professor Georgios Zervas (Boston University), published this month, found that some 16% of restaurant reviews on Yelp are fraudulent.
Yelp prohibits deceptive and fake reviews through its Terms of Service, and even filed a complaint last month in the California Superior Court for San Francisco County, alleging that a San Francisco law firm had posted several fake online reviews about the firm and its legal services. The complaint notes that “[t]he integrity of Yelp reviews is fundamental to Yelp’s business model (at 15) and argues that the law firm has violated California’s false advertising laws.
The action of NY AG is the first of its kind in the U.S., but we should expect AG Offices from other states to follow, as the issue is not likely to go away soon. AG Schneiderman even called astroturfing “the 21st century’s version of false advertising.”
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will probably tackle the issue soon as well, under Section 5 of the FTC Act which empowers the FTC to prevent the use of unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive business practices. The FTC could also provide guidelines to consumer review websites on best practices.
France has recently taken an interesting view on the issue. The French Association for Standardization, the AFNOR, published on July 4 a new NF Z74-501 norm about online consumer reviews. Websites may comply, on a voluntary basis, to a set of rules and procedures for reliable methods of treating and collecting online reviews of consumer products and services. If they do comply with the rule, they may post the NF Z74-501 seal of compliance on their site.
Whether or not astroturfing is prevented or its illegal use prosecuted by authorities, it is certainly a bad weed. (Sorry!)
Image is area 51 courtesy of Flickr user Michael Newton pursuant to a CC BY 2.0 license.
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