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?
- Isabella: does Rotten Tomatoes determine if you will watch?
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)
- Dominique: how does information asymmetry apply to influencers?
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)
- Jia: if a third of reviews are fake, why have reviews at all—and what about Rate My Professors?
Vine
- Sophie: you review books before release—does the free copy change what you write?
- Karena: how much effort do you put into an incentivized review, and what is Yelp doing about them?
How hard to find??
How to cope?
What techniques do you use?
- Tahlia: what are the “easy tells,” and will you still happily buy 5-star items?
Reading the stars
Reviewing distributions
Going meta
Both have shut down because Amazon and platforms are hostile to such efforts.
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)
- Giselle: what did “twisting” reviews at SharkNinja involve, and should Amazon and Google be held responsible?
- Danny: if Section 230 shields the platforms, can the FTC rule fix the measure?
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?
Social