New draft on online reviews outline (GS Paper 3, Economy)
Why in news?
- Recently, the Department of Consumer Affairs issued guidelines to curtail fake and deceptive product and service reviews on e-commerce websites.
Background:
- Work on the framework titled, ‘Online Consumer Reviews – Principles and Requirements for their Collection, Moderation and Publication’, began in June, when a committee was set up comprising industry stakeholders and consumer organisations.
- The standards were enforced on November 25 and apply to any platform which publishes consumer reviews online.
Why are guidelines necessary?
- There have concerns about the integrity of these reviews.
- There are complaints ranging from manufactured positive reviews by sellers or negative reviews by a competitor, engagement of “online reputation management” companies for improving reviews to a trust deficit in websites allegedly exercising bias for certain products by filtering out either negative or positive reviews.
- Moreover, companies have both penalised and incentivised consumers for writing negative and positive reviews respectively.
How do the guidelines deal with ‘fake’ reviewers?
- The crackdown on ‘fake’ reviews will have to begin by establishing the credentials of the author and their experience. This is also in the context of how consumers with their newfound status as ‘public critic’ advance positive reviews for certain returns.
- The guidelines state that user authentication is to be done either through email, telephone call, SMS, single sign-on and/or captcha system among other methods.
- Without acknowledging the terms and conditions of the website, and providing an email or telephone number, users will not be able to write reviews. The website has to make certain that all systems have anti-fraud mechanisms in place to protect personal data from internal and external fraud.
How will reviews be moderated?
- The central idea is to ensure that the experiences are genuine. This would be ascertained through authors’ activities such as frequency of writing reviews, history of contributions, location and use of language.
- The text must not contain profanity, illicit content, unintelligible content and reveal the author’s identity, especially because the review could also be done anonymously. Reviews must also mention the date of publishing so that readers are able to identify the more recent reviews irrespective of the website’s default filter.
- All reviews whether positive or negative are to be dealt with similar standards and operandi. This would particularly tackle negative reviews from being filtered out.
- Overall, violations would not only result in the particular review being removed. Other reviews on the site will be marked for scrutiny and they may be disallowed from carrying reviews on the platform again.
Significance:
- The reliability and consistency of the moderation process can be assessed using random sampling and survey methods (through interviews or written surveys), other than planting ‘pretend reviews’ for testing purposes on their platform.
- The guidelines would ensure that negative reviews on e-commerce platforms are not removed without reason, thus, ensuring customers are apprised of the problems sooner.
- In turn, this could also keep a check on a prevailing tendency among sellers to re-list products that had to be taken down because of lower ratings.
- Finally, for platforms like Google and Meta, the validation guidelines would, over time, erase accounts created solely for fake reviews.
