Can Review Sites Be Trusted?

Internet reviews are like a bikini. What they reveal is interesting, but what they conceal is vital.

Let’s start with Yelp. There have been so many complaints contending Yelp penalizes companies who don't pay for their services; posting questionable negative reviews while ignoring perfectly valid positive ones. I have been hearing these claims for years. Can they all be tacitly dismissed?

Yelp will not post reviews by anyone in any way associated with the reviewed business. Their newly enacted feature of adding your Yelp "friends" as if they were a Social Network is just a pretentious guise to positively identify reviews to ignore. This not only skews the objectivity and completeness of published reviews, but it also undermines their ability to present a trustworthy account of any business.

Recently Yelp won a class-action lawsuit that alleged its review policies amounted to nothing less than extortion. I cannot find any articles citing a forensic review of Yelp’s source code having ever been performed. Examining their business logic would reveal the truth about how reviews are accepted or rejected.

Other more blatantly deceptive review sites take advantage of the fact that their targets are helpless to refute reviewer claims, no matter how outlandish, due to the severe penalties inflicted for non-compliance of secrecy laws; PCI, HIPAA, FERPA, SOX, and GLBA, to name a few.

Doctors are particularly vulnerable. Given HIPAA non-compliance penalties can be as high as $1.5 million, they dare not publish any medical facts to rebut patient’s incomplete, fantasized or even fictional claims.

On most of these sites, reviewer names are optional, or not even requested. They make no attempt to establish the veracity of reviewer's claims, yet receive very high search engine rankings. Just as some companies hire those specializing in posting positive reviews, nothing prevents them from also writing fictional, negative reviews to stymie their competitors. The power of one positive view amounts to a fraction of a single negative review; regardless of the truthfulness of either.

The Three Wise Monkeys

Reviewer sites hide behind the cloak of internet privacy and free speech, however, aren't they being awarded a license to slander, while enabling those with nefarious intentions to flourish?

We are all potential victims of review sites; steered away from principled companies, and driven into incompetent, possibly dangerous ones.

How can anyone trust the integrity of internet reviews given the conflict of interest and lack of accountability these for-profit companies rely on for their very existence? The internet, once treasured as an Amazonian source for information dissemination has degenerated into a sewer of misinformation.

As in Lewis Carroll’s whimsical poem, the Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in Eight Fits) so delightfully muses:

"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried, As he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide By a finger entwined in his hair.

"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew.

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."

So, think thrice before acting upon anything you read on the internet.