Whose turf?

I place an enormous amount of faith in consumer-ranked websites like Tripadvisor and Urbanspoon in my everyday life. I wouldn't dream of booking a holiday without checking out it's rating on Tripadvisor, and I rarely go to a restaurant without seeing what everyone else has said about it on Urbanspoon. And my reliance on user reviews isn't unique. Riga found that most people seek out, trust and buy based on consumer reviews. 

Occasionally it's obvious that a restaurant owner has written a glowing review to get their presence on the website started. However, systematic and consistent fake consumer reviews have more sinister consequences. How do we know what is genuine, and what is hidden marketing? 

Astroturfing refers to fake 'grass roots' campaigning, and can turn up anywhere including in consumer reviews, industry, government and political activity. 

How can we spot astroturfing? This Urbanspoon page for Rodizio Grill in Minnesota, USA has some obvious examples of Astroturfing - a number of reviews written in quick succession, without any negative feedback, and written by users whose only review is this one. 

Astroturfing on Urbanspoon reviews of Rodizo Grill

In this case, the bottom two reviews obviously prompted the several reviews above them from the proprietor. The contrast between the reviews is too much of a co-incidence. 

Adam Turner thinks that astroturfing is becoming more prevalent and more subtle in Australia: 

This new form of astroturfing is far more subtle and harder to spot. Sometimes these corporate trolls actually stand out because they're biased but still less opinionated than the other trolls and rabid fanboys. Other times they go off on tangents which seem reasonable but deliberately sidestep the point of the original article in order to make their own point.
In short these corporate trolls are trying to come across as "everyday Australians" rather than opinionated jerks. It's a smart strategy and I suspect it's working.

These 'enemies of free speech' as Turner calls them, are increasingly blending in to other user commentary. Monbiet has found that companies are getting smarter, in order to avoid these give-aways. This includes software that creates all 'all the online furniture a real person would possess: a name, email accounts, web pages and social media. In other words, it automatically generates what look like authentic profiles, making it hard to tell the difference between a virtual robot and a real commentator'. In addition to this, accounts can be 'pre-aged' to create a history of comments and interactions, a key mark of authenticity. 

For this webfeature, we want to engage the GP in a hunt for astroturfing, in an aim to make it obvious and alert consumers to it's presence and power. The #astroturfing hashtag on Twitter is already being used for users to spot astroturfing. Using Twitter to spread the word will hopefully encourage other users to spot astroturfing and highlight businesses which are using this practice. 

Our target audience is quite broad, but would especially focus on web-savvy users and those who may rely on online reviews - a very Gen Y trait according to Dorsey. This group has grown up in a world saturated in advertising and are media literate and highly aware of people trying to pull the wool over their eyes. Gen Y would see astrotrufing as a kind of dishonesty that would lose an offending company their business. At the same time, they're savvy enough to spot it and, hopefully for the sake of our project, to share examples it. 

Other story angles include the perspective of the astroturfing company (though this will be difficult to find). Is it worth the risk for them? If their actual service isn't as good as their fake reviews, is it worth it at all? And an ethical perspective: is this something we need to 'protect' users from, or are user-review sites fairgame?  Furthermore we want to investigate how host sites respond to this (we know that Tripadvisor takes a hard line including dropping rankings for offending sites)

As this project develops I look forward to finding more examples and developing a response to some of these questions. I believe this is a truly engaging topic for my generation and think it will make a dynamic web feature.