By Conor O'Neill | February 12, 2007
E-consultancy has an article about the Times Online story on a new EU directive which may result in criminal prosecution for those who post false reviews about themselves, their products or services using false identities.
False reviews are a problem for any review site and are impossible to prevent. However the effect of it can be minimised through the feedback loops of user ratings of reviews. You will naturally gravitate towards those reviews which other users hold in high regard and since that reviewer reputation is an ever changing thing, gaming will always be balanced by well-intentioned users.
As our site is also built around the idea of publishing and aggregating distributed reviews to and from blogs, readers can see the entire history of a bloggers activity on their blog to aid them in deciding whether that bloggers opinions are valuable. Most of us posess that important human attribute, good judgement, to guide us when seeking the opinions of others. I am not convinced that any legal or formal approach to trying to prevent “bad information” can ever succeed.