Samsung in "fake negative reviews" probe in Taiwan

How widespread are fake reviews?

[Leosghost]

Fair-trade officials in Taiwan are looking into reports that Samsung paid people to criticise rival HTC online.

[bbc.co.uk...]

Fake reviews, astro-turfing, shilling, posting FUD..perception/ reputation management..many names for similar processes..

How widespread are they, can you spot them, would you do them, do you do them ? ..

[ken_b]

I sort of assume that the best and worst reviews of any product or service are paid/fake/worthless.

[engine]

Fake reviews, positive or negative, is spam, imho.

[graeme_p]

Very often I do not know.

There used to be MS advocates on Slashdot who all said almost exactly the same thing. I never really knew if they were:

1) Astroturfers with a script.
2) Fanatical fans who just all sounded the same (possibly repeating each other or PR from the same source).
3) People trying too hard to counter the site's perceived pro-open source/anti-MS bias (I say perceived because so many people were doing this, it was not true any more).

Astro turfing is definitely very widespread:

[link]http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/feb/23/need-to-protect-internet-from-astroturfing[/link]

[RhinoFish]

Headline: Samsung Sino Shill Sing Sing Sting.

[thecoalman]

I've caught two manufacturers spamming my forum with fake "reviews", I'm sure there has been many others. You have to love the "but that wasn't us".... raw access logs don't lie and I'm sure 99.9% of them don't understand the power of grep.

I sort of assume that the best and worst reviews of any product or service are paid/fake/worthless.

The worst are more likely to be true but only becsue people don;t go out of their way to post positive information.

[RhinoFish]

"raw access logs don't lie"
sometimes they do, be careful.
:-)

[Old_Honky]

I never read reviews, they are mostly written by someone with an axe to grind and are invariably subjective. Other people's opinions are their business, so I will make up my own mind.

[Kendo]

This is the very reason that search engines should NOT give any preference or relevance to reviews and blogs. In fact anything posted by anonymous, unknown and amateur entities should never be indexed!