TripAdvisor, the travel platform trusted and mistrusted by hundreds of millions worldwide would like to explain what it’s been doing to clean up its act on the notorious flood of fake reviews that can be found among the genuine traveler opinions.
For the past few years, it’s been publishing a Review Transparency Report discussing how it’s doing on that front, and the 2021 report, issued last week for 2020, has some interesting numbers. That includes one metric not seen in previous reports: 50,000 reviews taken down for violating the site’s Covid guidelines.
- TripAdvisor uses both automated analysis, looking for patterns and triggers, and a human content moderation team. In 2020, more than 2 million of the 26 million reviews submitted were rejected, either by the bot or the team. That’s about 8.6%. Another 1% of reviews were flagged by travelers or businesses.
- Of the items flagged by users, TripAdvisor says, 85% were assessed by content moderators within four hours and 43% of those were removed.
- TA says only 3.6% of all review submissions were found to be fraudulent, but that’s nearly a million fake reviews. The company says it blocked 67% of all fake reviews from ever making it onto the site.
- And, it says it penalized 34,605 properties for fraudulent activity, mostly paying for reviews, and banned over 20,000 members for ‘failing to abide by the site’s standards.’ It also identified 65 new sites posting paid reviews and banned a total of 372 companies that were selling paid reviews.
- Oh, and by the way, the average review awarded 4.3 out of 5.0, up from the previous year’s 4.22.
