How the government is tackling dubious online reviews

Remember when you fell for the great reviews and then received garbage in the mail?

Or maybe you were tempted by a restaurant guest’s delicious description of a meal that turned out to be junk.

These misleading reviews could soon be a thing of the past.

What happens to shady online reviews?

Just like you, the Federal Trade Commission is fed up with companies trying to pass off fake reviews as real customer feedback.

“Fake reviews not only waste people’s time and money, they also pollute the market and put honest competitors out of business,” FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said in a press release.

To counteract this, the FTC wants to use new rules to prevent companies from exploiting the system.

• Fake or false consumer reviews, consumer testimonials, and celebrity testimonials will be banned. These include companies that get users to leave reviews without trying a product, as well as AI-generated reviews.
• Buying positive or negative reviews is prohibited. This is intended to prevent companies from offering benefits such as discounts to people who leave positive reviews.
• Insider reviews and customer opinions are prohibited. Stop leaving reviews for your own business.
• Corporate-controlled review websites are prohibited. Some companies create their own websites to review their products and services. This will stop.
• Suppressing reviews is prohibited. The FTC says it will prevent companies from using “unfounded or baseless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or certain false public accusations to prevent or remove a negative consumer review.”
• The “abuse of fake social media indicators” is prohibited. This affects companies that buy followers on social media to misrepresent their “influence or importance.”

All of this is expected to come into effect sometime in the next two months.

How Yelp started calling out businesses for fake reviews

To get a sense of how big this problem really is, popular review website Yelp tracks how frequently businesses on its platform use questionable tactics.

Yelp routinely places warnings on business pages once the site is found to be violating the site’s Terms of Service. Over the past 12 years, Yelp has had to place more than 5,500 warnings about paid activity and suspicious review activity on business pages.

READ MORE: Florida Chipotle stirs up excitement in online reviews with guacamole

Violations include restaurant posters promising discounts for positive feedback on Yelp, as well as multiple reviews of a business coming from the same IP address.

You can find a list of businesses that have been busted by Yelp on the Yelp website, as well as actual evidence of how each business tried to be underhanded and rip off prospective customers.