How to comply with the ban on fake reviews

CMA guidance

A CMA Fake Reviews Guidance note (CMA208) provides further clarity. To avoid falling foul of the new rules, travel companies are advised to take the following steps:

• Only encourage submission of reviews that reflect genuine experience of a travel service. Companies should not interfere with the ability or willingness of reviewers to leave negative reviews, such as by: stopping and starting review invitations; encouraging only those satisfied to leave reviews; persuading consumers to submit a complaint rather than leave a review; dissuading consumers from leaving a review even if a problem has been resolved; treating a negative review as a complaint and not publishing it; or offering dispute resolution contingent on not leaving a negative review.
• Refrain from cherry-picking positive reviews: take care not to select only favourable reviews or to highlight positive reviews when these do not reflect the experience reported by reviewers overall.
• Publish a clear policy that prohibits fake reviews and sets out an approach to incentivised reviews and review information. It should make clear how to submit reviews, who can submit a review, the basis for decisions on publishing and removing reviews, and how ratings work.
• Detect banned reviews and prevent these being published. Detection measures could include: requiring reviewers to provide identifying information or allowing reviews only when possible to verify a reviewer is a genuine customer; keeping records of the review submission history and allowing users to see a reviewer’s public review history; using automated software to spot patterns that may indicate fake reviews (such as reviews under different names from the same IP address, or spikes in highly positive or negative reviews); and having a system to report suspected fake reviews or false or misleading review information.
• Where a company is not able to determine that content is unlawful, it should investigate reviews or false or misleading review information, considering in advance what sort of evidence may be required to establish the facts and how long reviewers have to provide information. The CMA has said it is important to ensure no unreasonable delays to publication of genuine reviews and genuine negative reviews are not removed. If temporary measures are applied, such as withholding reviews or marking them as pending or suspicious, this should be clearly communicated to consumers.
• Take reasonable and proportionate steps: these could include imposing sanctions where appropriate by banning user accounts or suspending or revoking reviewer privileges.
• Update star ratings, review counts and rankings where reviews have been identified and removed as fake.
• Conduct regular risk assessments of the prevention and removal process, including the risk that consumers encounter banned reviews or false or misleading review information.
• If using content from a third-party reviews site, carefully assess the third party’s policies for monitoring and tackling banned reviews. But a company will be responsible for taking its own steps to prevent and remove fake reviews on its own site.

Travel companies need to balance the need to screen suspicious activity with not preventing genuine, lawful reviews from display. Note that removing a negative review which was genuinely created may mislead consumers as much as publishing a fake positive review.

The CMA has allowed a ‘grace period’ after feedback that the provisions require changes to systems and compliance programmes and said it will focus until July 6 on helping businesses to comply rather than sanctioning non-compliance.