Faking it!

Faking It!

Today a story has appeared relating to the supposed fake reviews that now plague Trip Advisor and other similar sites.  In addition the article also highlights the supposed manipulative practices of travel sites such as Expedia and Booking.com

The original article can be found here: Fake Reviews

How surprising is this really?  After 25 years of humans trolling other humans and businesses are we still supposed to be shocked? On the subject of Expedia and Booking.com manipulating the market for travel pricing - I see no real insight here either.  Big business is awash with price fixing and market manipulation. Lets not even get onto the subject of banks.

Fake reviews are as old as the Internet and there is never going to be a solid gold way of stopping a disgruntled ex-employee or a local competitor finding a way to soil the reputation of another business through on-line commentary.  Businesses need to have the tools to deal with these comments to establish that a grievance is valid or fake, but not to negate those comments that work against them if they are genuine.

The real story here is that regulation of markets and big business influence here is once again - under developed.  The penalties for businesses behaving like this are non existent so the companies involved with this have no fear.  Get caught, so what!

It sometimes feels that because something is happening on-line that it is different to a more physical business in a real-world market.  If it happens in the real world then the on-line equivalent will quickly behave in the same way.  Until the chances of getting caught are high and the punishment significant then nothing is going to change.  Personally I would like to see business caught fake-reviewing or manipulating prices name-and-shamed, but I'm not holding my breathe.