Tripadvisor removed 1.3 million fake reviews in 2022
The company’s third edition of its biennial Review Transparency Report shows that 30.2 million reviews were posted globally on its site in 2022, a 20% increase since 2020 when the previous edition of the report was published.
Of those reviews, 4.4% - 1.33 million - were determined to be fake or fraudulent with the company reporting that is detection and moderation processes prevented 72% of these submissions from ever making it onto the platform, up from 67% in 2020.
Around 2.3 million reviews were manually investigated by a Tripadvisor moderator, it says.
The report also highlighted what the company says is the ‘damaging impact on consumer trust’ that paid review companies have on its site, but says that they represent only a small proportion of fraudulent content. In 2022, it removed 24,521 reviews associated with paid review companies, with almost half originating from the same six countries: India, Russia, US, Turkey, Italy, and Vietnam.
To deter businesses from resorting to paid reviews, Tripadvisor says it takes ‘strict’ action against offending establishments with content bans, ranking penalties and red badges flagged on the listing to discourage businesses from what it described as ‘cheating the system.’ This year’s report shows that Tripadvisor applied a ranking penalty to just over 33,000 businesses for fraud and issued 341 red badge warnings in 2022, each of these enforced with a ranking penalty.
“Platforms like ours are built on trust, so we never stop learning and improving our systems to ensure our community has access to honest, accurate content,” says Becky Foley, vice president, trust and safety at Tripadvisor.
“The findings from this report show that our approach is working; we’re catching a higher proportion of fraudulent content before it is published, with nearly three-quarters of fake reviews never even making it to the platform.”
