The Rossen Reports just had an article about how to spot fake online reviews. Some suggestions are:
- Head straight for the 2, 3, and 4-star reviews. Companies pay for 5-star ones, so the moderate reviews are more realistic.
- Check for a sudden burst of reviews during a short time span. Phony reviews tend to be published in bulk over a short period of time, sometimes all on the same day.
- We always buy the items that have the most amount of reviews with a good average number of stars. We love to see 5,000 reviews and an average rating of 4.9. But experts say those numbers could be padded, so don’t put too much weight on them.
- Check for pictures. Good and bad, real customers post photos of the product. This will help you analyze what it looks like in real life.
- The FTC recommends checking to see if the reviewer of the product is legit. Click on the name to see if they’ve written other reviews as well. If they’ve written the same short review on a lot of products, they might be a phony.
- Web extensions like Fakespot will help you as well.
I’ve already been doing items 1 and 3, and I’m considering the others. I’ve now installed Fakespot on Firefox, the web browser we use. It’s time-consuming to do an analysis, and I may not use it much, but it’s an interesting idea. Hopefully it will be deterrent to the worst offenders?
May 6, 2023
This is good advice. I read reviews before purchasing products but often wonder if they are real or fake.
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I will not be using it since I dont trust anything done by AI and it is an apple app run by AI.. for fun I just searched for reviews of Fakespot and found it was 3.9 stars but only by one website and only out of 7 reviews.
I do read reveiws when I purchase devices or appliances, but i take with a grain of salt. I have serious trust issues with people and people write reviews. also what is horrid to one is great to another. this E world gets harder to follow every day. Glad you posted this, I had not heard of it and now I have and will be wary of reveiws, all the info is good and means we need to use our commonsense, but then I am also HUMAN and who knows if my commonsense is what i think it is.
I’ll write soon about an AI program I love.
I LOVE this!! We belong to amazon Prime, and I spend a lot of time reading reviews. I am going to this website now as well!
It’s fun to try.
I just added Fakespot, and am excited to try it!
I think it’s fun. 🙂
How interesting! Doing research generally serves only to give me a headache, but it’s a necessary evil. I’m going to check this out.
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Thanks for the pointers! I read all the reviews on the stuff I buy…or at least the first 200 if there are more.
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