​Suss out the fake reviews

The Sunday Times, page C2

TripAdvisor acknowledged the problem of fake reviews, but said these occur far less frequently than charged. Last month, it released its first Review Transparency Report, detailing how it weeds out fake reviews from the millions submitted to the website each year. Asst Prof Andrew Duffy from NTU’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, who wrote his 2013 PhD thesis on issues of trust and TripAdvisor, says: “TripAdvisor is like the MRT. It has massive utility and to focus only on breakdowns misses the point of what the site does.”