Some of the biggest names in online commerce have formed the Coalition for Trusted Reviews, a cross-industry collaboration seeking to define best practices for hosting online reviews and sharing methods of fake review detection.
Founding Coalition members Amazon, Booking.com, Expedia Group, Glassdoor, Tripadvisor and Trustpilot met in San Francisco in October 2022 at the first-ever Fake Reviews Conference, organized by Tripadvisor, where they heard from government, academic and industry professionals about the challenges and potential mitigation approaches for dealing with fake reviews.
The Coalition will engage in several key areas to protect consumers and partners from fake reviews, including:
- Industry alignment: Developing common standards and definitions for use throughout the industry around what constitutes a fake review and other content moderation nomenclature and measurement;
- Best practice sharing: Defining best practices for hosting online reviews and sharing information on updated content moderation processes and methods of fake review detection;
- Information sharing: Sharing information relating to how fraudulent actors operate, such as companies selling fake reviews to businesses seeking to unfairly and improperly improve their reputations; and
- Advocacy: Engaging with academics and public policy leaders to promote the benefits to consumers of review content and support industry efforts to combat fake reviews from being published.
“Customer reviews are an important part of the shopping experience, and the goal of this coalition is to ensure every review reflects customers’ actual experiences,” said Dharmesh Mehta, VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Services at Amazon in a statement. “Amazon is aggressively fighting fake review brokers to protect our customers and selling partners, but these fraudsters are a global problem, impacting multiple industry sectors. Through greater collaboration and sharing across industries, including information on fraudsters’ tactics and how they operate, we can more effectively shut down fraudulent review activity, deter other bad actors from attempting to game our systems, and protect more consumers.”
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