How much truth is there on the Internet? Should I go to watch Star Wars?

    Humanity as it was and remained trusting. Only before they unconditionally believed the newspaper Pravda, now they also insanely believe Wikipedia, the automatic translator Google Translate and reviews on Yandex.Market. Who can be trusted? The next translation on the topic of Social & Brand Analytics is dedicated to the moments when you should be wary and how to detect a fake review.

    Has Twitter finally dealt with the problem of fake online reviews?
    Around the fake online reviews, a whole business has formed in which people offer to write reviews for money. But under the increasing pressure of regulators and new applications that analyze social media in real time, this practice is finally gradually coming to an end, says Monty Munford.

    The culture of reviews and criticism is certainly strong. A new episode of "Star Wars" - a lot of people, even from non-fans, were looking forward to it. Nevertheless, reviews of one or two stars (out of 5) in publications that are not controlled by the PR-teams of the film may dissuade people who want to watch it. The power of the pen, although in decline, still exists.

    Recently, the power of this pen itself has been poisoned by the practice of writing fake reviews on sites by so-called “reviewers,” who praise restaurants or products in exchange for money. Some companies have experimented with writing false reviews on sites such as TripAdvisor, and are reporting 100% success.

    Nevertheless, they are actively fighting this false culture. Amazon recently said it would file lawsuits in the United States against 1,000 people offering fake reviews for money.

    At the same time, the US Senate is considering a bill on the Act of Consumer Freedom of Survey, which is designed to deal with cases where customers, without knowing it, are obligated to write online reviews when buying food or other products. The long-delayed attack on all fronts has finally begun.

    In the current state of online reviews, there are undoubtedly a lot of minuses, and even applications that determine the user's location fall into the trap, simply collecting a large number of saved reviews, thereby unwittingly encouraging the practice of writing purchased reviews.

    Fortunately, there is an active struggle with this, and Twitter users can be thanked for its beginning. Last month, the #norecieptnoreview movement peaked, requiring TripAdvisor users to write a review only when submitting a scanned receipt.

    And finally, there is a new generation of geo-applications (applications that collect user’s location data) that extract content from information published on social media and use algorithms to analyze data from Twitter, which means that real reviews are finally possible. Instead of the usual mass gathering of reviews, they work in real time, collecting information including the emotional color of messages, reliability and location.

    Twizoo- One of such applications that recommends restaurants based on similar data, and not on mass-collected reviews. Twizoo claims that it has access to 700% more data than Yelp or TripAdvisor, which extract only 3 percent of the data from the massive collection of reviews.

    “Our app gives restaurant recommendations based on what Twitter users write. Unlike traditional online review sites, we do not rely on a massive collection of reviews. Instead, we developed an algorithm that independently filters relevant opinions directly from Twitter, "says Madeline Parra, head and founder of Twizoo.

    “With entire businesses built around online reviews, such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, maintaining their current business model is becoming more and more expensive,” she added.

    The number of businesses and applications using Twitter is growing rapidly, while the business of false reviews is finally crashing, and companies specializing in monitoring social media are booming.

    One such company in the UK, based in Brighton, Brandwatch , has grown from a regional company into a global concern over the past five years. The company recently received $ 33 million in Series C funding and has 300 employees in 6 major cities.

    Head of the company Gilles Palmer believes that applications such as Twizoo only laid the foundation for a new system for evaluating businesses and products, especially with such a rapid development of social media.
    “Until recently, monitoring social media was just a rather passive business, where companies and brands only watched what their users do on social media, but in no way influenced them,” he said.

    “But buyers are interested in or any other product they want to make an instant decision based on instantly available data. They also want this data to be verified and reliable, and Twitter can provide it. "

    Any trend that improves the current state of affairs always comes in handy, and although some say that it is finally time to take care of the problem of the deplorable state of online reviews, it is undoubtedly good that new algorithms and motivated regulators are engaged in the problem.

    Over time, it will be clear whether the new Star Wars episode turns out to be a masterpiece or not, but real online reviews published by honest Twitter users, not the villains and liars publishing trumped-up reviews, will tell us about this

    Source
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    According to Svetlana Krylova, Head of Brand Analytics Analytical Center(the Russian system of monitoring and analysis of social media is an analogue of the English Brandwatch) in Russia the situation is much tougher: every fifth client is forced not only to monitor reviews about his company and brand, but also actively respond (counteract) information attacks of competitors and “bad accounts”.

    The problem of detecting bots and “orders” is a new large market. It's time (counter) to act.

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