Manipulated

Joseph Reagle

Our question(s)

What to do in the face of online manipulation?

Rating everything and everyone

Jotly: Rating everything

The shed

Thoughts?

What problem do ratings solve in online commerce?
Does rating everything give you the creeps?
Was this a fad, or a long-lasting change?
Have you been affected by quantification or reviews?

Sebastian/Brooke: Goodhart/Strathern’s law?
Shritha: what did the tech repair store ask you to do?
Reese: how do you pick a restaurant?
Laith: what’s your peer doing to get a desired instructor?

Concepts

What is information asymmetry?
- the seller knows more than the buyer
What might explain the pressure to join an Instagram pod or to fake reviews?
- prisoner’s dilemma
What is Goodhart/Strathern’s Law?
- “When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.” (Strathern 1997, p. 308)

Policing fakers

CAPTCHA

Began as a way of reading books, but bots soon excelled.

Of course

More realistically

What is a bot?

Amazon Turk

Turker or Robot?

Human fraud

Facebook fraud

Factoids

A one-star increase leads to 5% to 9% more revenue. (Berke 2015)
Between 10% to 30% of online reviews are fake. (Streitfeld 2012; Luca & Zervas 2013; Fakespot 2021)
The probability of seeing a positive review after a negative one was 72%—clever method! (Hu et al. 2012, p. 681)

Kelli: you had an idea about using the 72% stat as a detection heuristic?
Ayla: what did you learn about response bias in AP Stats?

Vine

How hard to find??

How to cope?

What techniques do you use?

Anthony: you wrote about how platforms order and display reviews—what should consumers watch for?
Kisbel: what signals of authenticity did you identify?

Reading the stars

Reviewing distributions

Going meta

Regulation

As of 2024-10-22, the FTC can take action against those:

creating, selling, purchasing, or spreading fake reviews/testimonials
hijacking reviews
buying positive or negative reviews
not disclosing insider consumer reviews and testimonials
misleading consumers regarding review websites
suppressing reviews
selling, spreading, or purchasing fake social media clout

Third-party review websites (e.g., Google and Yelp) are not addressed. (Fowler 2023; Knight 2024)

Ryan/Tianhong: what role does Section 230 play here?
Shritha: why doesn’t the FTC hold the big platforms accountable?

Responses

Go Around 🎲

interesting factoids or concepts?
recent examples of fake reviews or manipulation?
is online commerce doomed?

Conclusion

Concept MCQ

Write a simple multiple choice question for one of the following:

makers, fakers, takers
CAPTCHA; Vine
sockpuppets; information asymmetry
Amazon Turk

Questions?

Review

What is asymmetric information?
What do CAPTCHAs and Amazon Turk have in common?