Over 1 million fake reviews were discovered by Tripadvisor last year, and the bulk of them were prevented from being posted.
According to the firm, the site found more than 1.3 million bogus or fraudulent reviews in 2022, or approximately 4.4 percent of all reviews. Tripadvisor said it prevented 72 percent of those from ever appearing on the platform, which is “significant improvement” over 2020 when only 67 percent were prevented.
In the 2023 Review Transparency report from Tripadvisor, the additional information was made public.
“Tripadvisor is built on trust, and we will never stop improving our systems to ensure our community has access to reliable content and the businesses listed can compete on a level playing field. The findings from this report show that our approach is working; we’re catching a higher proportion of fraudulent content before it is published, with nearly three-quarters of fake reviews never even making it to the platform.”
Becky Foley, the vice president for trust and safety at Tripadvisor
Just over 24,500 of the fraudulent reviews that were found last year were connected to paid review services. And six nations—India, Russia, the United States, Turkey, Italy, and Vietnam—accounted for roughly half of those imports.
If a review was “submitted by someone who is either biased in some way and/or who did not have a personal experience with the business they reviewed,” it is deemed to be phony, according to the business.
Although it’s not always simple to recognize a false review, there are certain ways that tourists can tell whether what they’re reading is real, such as by looking for evaluations that are recent, first-hand, pertinent, respectful, and neutral.
In addition to removing reviews for being fake, Tripadvisor has done so for a number of other reasons, such as foul language, technical problems including overly repeated characters, and irrelevant remarks.