Reviews on business pages are great, because often they’ll tell us what we need to know. Whether there are hidden fees, or if the company is excelling in ways we might not imagine. However, not all reviews are genuine and some can be purposely damaging. Meta rule to crack down on real vs fake reviews.
Meta’s Community Feedback Policy
Meta are releasing a new Community Feedback Policy within the United States. If it all goes to plan, perhaps they’ll spread it across more countries. The aim is to ensure all reviews are legitimate. Therefore, no one should be able to review a product or service they haven’t experienced for themselves. This really should have always been the case. However, unfortunately it seems many false reviews have been uploaded to the site. This is extremely damaging for the businesses and individuals involved. Ruining someone’s reputation isn’t something that should ever be taken lightly.
The platform have previously taken steps to stand up to abusive reviews. Now though, they have everything in writing. Meta have said “businesses on Facebook must prohibit the manipulation of reviews, incentivization, irrelevance, graphic content and spam.” The new guidelines make it clear people cannot be paid to leave positive nor negative reviews. So, you cannot encourage your customers to leave you a review through bribing them. Likewise, you cannot sabotage your competition in the same way.
The policy also covers cases where people leave negative reviews simply to be refunded on products they’re actually content with. This isn’t saying you can’t leave bad reviews. After all, if the company weren’t up to expectations and chose to do nothing to rectify their actions, they perhaps deserve the negative review. It can be clear when someone is out to gain through bad reviews, because all others are neutral or positive, and then you’ll come across one overly negative. However, this isn’t always clear-cut because it could be that the company genuinely slipped up.
Abusive behaviour to be stopped
Abusive behaviour won’t be tolerated which is easier to monitor. Meta have become really strict on things you can and can’t say on the platform. Calling your friends rude language can result in you being blocked for a period of time. So, writing something hurtful on a company’s page, certainly will have consequences. They’re hopeful over time people will start to mellow off their own accord. By being unable to speak in a certain way, people will get used to it and no longer try. This is Meta’s belief anyway. The company are encouraging everyone to report suspicious reviews. This could help businesses that are under fire from their competition or a disgruntled ex-employee.
Last year alone, Facebook removed 16,000 groups. These pages were aimed at trading fake reviews for monetary gain. People who had never visited a company or used their products were being paid to say they had and that they were awful, or on the other hand, really good. All depending on the side they were on. They’ve made it even harder to discover any groups like this that might appear on the platform too. This is as an extra push to avoid groups like this being able to exist. They hope this will mean the ones that were banned, don’t reappear. If they do, Facebook believe their previous members won’t be able to find them.
