Amazon revealed today that it has teamed up with Booking.com, Expedia Group, Glassdoor, Tripadvisor, and Trustpilot to launch the global Coalition for Trusted Reviews, a cross-industry collaboration committed to protecting access to trustworthy consumer reviews worldwide. Members will define best practices for hosting online reviews and sharing methods of fake review detection, aiming to stop the propagation of fake reviews.
Companies met in October 2022 in San Francisco at the first ever Fake Reviews Conference. Attendees heard from experts in government, academia, and the industry on challenges and mitigation approaches related to fake reviews. This resulted in the establishment of a formal coalition to collaborate on public education and decrease review fraud.
“Customer reviews are an important part of the shopping experience, and the goal of this coalition is to ensure every review reflects customers’ actual experiences,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s VP of worldwide selling partner services, in a statement. “Amazon is aggressively fighting fake review brokers to protect our customers and selling partners, but these fraudsters are a global problem, impacting multiple industry sectors. Through greater collaboration and sharing across industries, including information on fraudsters’ tactics and how they operate, we can more effectively shut down fraudulent review activity, deter other bad actors from attempting to game our systems, and protect more consumers.”
The group has agreed to engage in several key areas to protect consumers and partners from fake reviews, working to help ensure the public is not misled by fraudulent content, including:
• Developing common standards and definitions for use throughout the industry around what constitutes a fake review and other content moderation nomenclature and measurement.
• Defining best practices for hosting online reviews and sharing information on updated content moderation process and methods of fake review detection.
• Sharing information relating to how fraudulent actors operate, such as companies selling fake reviews to businesses seeking to unfairly improve their reputations.
• Engaging with public policy leaders to promote the benefits to consumers of review content and support industry efforts to combat fake reviews from being published.
Members will next meet in Brussels on December 5-6 at the second Fake Reviews Conference, organized by Amazon.
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