Sunday, June 3, 2012

The Ethics of Online Reviews

About a year ago I wrote a post about the ethics involved with online ratings of professionals, and specifically doctors, being used to intentionally tarnish the reputation of the individual being rated for no known reason. Some of the cases appear to have been disgruntled former customers, but there appear to have been a significant number of instances where the poster couldn’t possibly have known the target of his or her ire, and was simply using the comments to cause random harm – the electronic equivalent of vandalism. Some of the worst cases were clearly competing businesses trying to gain customers at the expense of the competition by trashing them in the online comments – a particularly vicious tactic when the target is an inexperienced or unsophisticated Internet user and can’t fight back. But what worried me most at the time was the potential to move beyond dirty tricks and malicious mischief, and go into actual extortion…

A story this past week in the Sacramento Bee tells about several such cases affecting restaurants in the city; people demanding free food, drink or other benefits from the establishment in exchange for not writing negative reviews on Yelp or other online services. I’m not going to comment on the ethics of this practice, since I don’t believe there is much basis for discussion (extortion is extortion, whatever the threat you’re using happens to be, and should be prosecuted as such), and I don’t think there’s much point in debating the ethics of services like Yelp, since people could use social networking sites, purpose-built web pages or even email to get the same effects if they wanted to. I think the real question is what can we do about such bogus reviews, and specifically is there anything we can do that wouldn’t be worse than what we have now?

In some cases it might be possible to remove the element of anonymity from the equation, by requiring the users leaving the comments to register and provide some connection to their real-world identity, the way Amazon does with their customer comments section. This doesn’t keep people from using multiple fake accounts to generate dozens of bogus reviews in order to plug their own products, but it lowers the number of people who would be willing to do so in order to get a free meal – creating multiple fake user accounts is time consuming and is also illegal in several parts of the world. Moreover, a badly crafted attack using multiple fakes is easy to spot (and remove), and a well-crafted one will take more time and effort than you’d spend if you just paid for the goods yourself…

On the other hand, many people are unwilling to give honest reviews of something if they know there’s a chance that the subject of their remarks can identify them and seek revenge. This would lead to fewer honest reviews being published as well, and there is also a significant potential for abuse of such a requirement – businesses that are substandard and do deserve negative reviews might attempt to intimidate users into leaving more positive comments or keeping quiet. There’s also the possibility of rating sites themselves trying to extort money from businesses by promising to suppress negative reviews (or threatening to delete positive ones) if they aren’t paid off. Yelp has already been accused of this practice, and even if they are completely innocent, it’s only a matter of time before some online rating service does cross this line…

Legislative remedies aren’t really possible, since this is a free speech issue, and even if they were there would be no way to enforce such laws without requiring people to identify themselves before leaving reviews – which is also an invasion of privacy issue, in addition to the drawbacks noted above. In the end, this is going to come down to the decisions (and ethics) of individual business people. So I have to ask: if the potential for abusing online comments is so extreme as to constitute extortion, can we in good conscience offer or make use of such a service? Do we, as business people, have an ethical responsibility to other businesses (or to the stakeholders in our own business) to prevent this sort of cyber-crime from happening? Or do we, as citizens of a free republic, have an ethical responsibility to defend free speech for everyone, even though we know that some people will use online comments to harm others?

It’s worth thinking about…

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