TripAdvisor ensures that only 2.1% of reviews are falseTecnoHotel

TripAdvisor has published its first Opinion Transparency report today, in which it reveals unpublished details so far about its opinion moderation processes, as well as statistical data on the volume of false comments directed to the platform during 2018.

According to these data, which contrast with others such as those published by Fakespot, in 2018 the world travelers community sent 66 million opinions to TripAdvisor.

The platform's fraud detection technology analyzed all of this and 2.7 million were subject to further human evaluation by content moderators. After this process, 4.7% of opinions were rejected or deleted in one of these two analysis processes.

Also, according to this comprehensive report, only 2.1% of the opinions received were considered fraudulent, and the vast majority of them (73%) were blocked before publication. In short, more than a million false opinions were stopped before they were displayed on the platform.

Even so, users and companies denounced about 1% of the opinions expressed on the platform for potentially skipping TripAdvisor's content policies, which were manually reviewed to make a decision.

Finally, it should also be noted that almost 35,000 businesses suffered a penalty in the ranking for trying to publish false opinions. This penalty entails a fall in business in the popularity index or ranking of travelers.

Fight against those who sell opinions

The report also describes the efforts of TripAdvisor to catch those who write paid opinions, people or companies trying to sell user opinions to the businesses listed on the platform.

Since 2015, TripAdvisor has interrupted the activity of more than 75 websites that were discovered trying to sell opinions, including an individual who was sentenced last year to nine months in prison by the Lecce Criminal Court in Italy.

«We are winning the battle against false opinions on TripAdvisor, but we can only protect our plot on the Internet. While other opinion platforms do not take more serious measures, scammers will continue to exploit and extort money from small businesses. It's time for other platforms like Google and Facebook to join us to address this problem head on, ”concludes Becky Foley, senior director of Trust and Security at TripAdvisor.

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