Security News > 2020 > June > 80% of consumers trust a review platform more if it displays fake reviews

Fake reviews are a significant threat for online review portals and product search engines given the potential for damage to consumer trust.

"We find consumers have more trust in the information provided by review portals that display fraudulent reviews alongside nonfraudulent reviews, as opposed to the common practice of censoring suspected fraudulent reviews," said Beibei Li of Carnegie Mellon University.

This study used large-scale data from Yelp to conduct experiments to measure trust and found 80% of the users in our survey agree they trust a review platform more if it displays fake review information because businesses are less likely to write fraud reviews on these platforms.

The study also finds that consumers tend to trust the information provided by platforms more when the platform distinguished and displayed fraudulent reviews from nonfraudulent reviews, as compared to the more common practice of censoring suspected fraudulent reviews.

A platform may admit to users that there is fraud on its site, but that is balanced by an increase in trust from consumers who already suspected that some reviews may be fraudulent and now see that something is being done to address it.

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