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Reality Online Is Anything But Real
It has been close to a year since we brought attention to the fact that it is exceptionally easy to purchase “likes” and “followers” for social media accounts. (Read the opening Week in Review from March 20. 2019 or our “Your Money” column July 10, 2019.) What made us think about it again was because we received a super-long email offering to sell us 10,000 Instagram followers for $90, 1,000 Facebook “likes” for $35, or 500 Twitter followers for $20. All of these things are indeed possible on dozens of websites, like SocialQuicks[.]com, but this email is actually malicious clickbait pretending to be Social Quicks. The email came from, and links point back to tokdev[.]com, a website that was registered in Pakistan in January.
Nevermind that this offer was both fake and malicious, it has to make you wonder whether you can ever believe that followers and likes are ever real! Do you know that web “influencers” can earn millions of dollars through sponsorships and advertising? This problem of fake followers and fake likes artificially raising ad revenue for influencers was documented very well in a September, 2019 article by Emma Ellis for Wired Magazine titled Fighting Instagrams $1.3Billion Problem - Fake Followers. (This article from the Marketing Service Pixlee.com provides several good tips on how to spot fake followers.)
There are many ways to monetize fake interest in things online, including fake reviews for products and services. Though the above offer is malicious clickbait, here is a recent real screenshot to purchase fake reviews from Social Quick:
It begs the question…. How can you trust what anyone is saying online, especially about products and services when it dramatically serves the seller’s interests to have positive reviews? We routinely read people’s reviews for products before deciding whether or not we want to buy it. But what is fact and what is fiction? This is a serious problem. Fortunately, there are tools available to help you cut through the crap ---assuming you are savvy enough to know there is a lot of fakery out there masquerading as real! One of the best tools we’ve found to reveal questionable or fake reviews for online products is a free service called Fakespot.com. The AI for this service claims to be able to spot “suspicious patterns and incentivized reviews.” They give the product a letter grade reflecting the reliability of both the product, the company selling the product, as well as what they may know about the product availability.
For example, we visited Amazon looking for a new dog bed and found this BarkBox plush orthopedic joint relief crate lounger. It had a 4.5 star rating from 1255 customer ratings! Sounds awesome, right? We copied the URL (link) from our browser and pasted it into the Analyzer window of FakeSpot.com and clicked “analyze.” The bed received a “D’ grade for “insufficient reliable reviews.” In addition, the parent company Barkbox was given a “C” rating because nearly 20% of 49 of their reviewed products had been found to be unreliable.
Again we went looking for something on Amazon, this time a gaming headset with microphone. We found this headset by Beexcellent with 1,276 reviews giving it a 4.5 star rating. Only it wasn’t, according to Fakespot.com. They downgraded that rating to 3.5 stars and gave the product reviews a “D” rating!
You don’t have to conduct all your reviews using Amazon links. You can copy the link for most consumer products as long as they include website reviews, such as this car audio speaker we found on BestBuy.com. We were pleased to see that Fakespot rated these 560 reviews as reliable, giving them an “A” grade!
So the next time you are cruising the internet or social media and you see a lot of positive interest in someone or something, we want you to think twice because EVERYTHING can be manipulated online! Not everything is as it appears to be.
(Another web service that specifically analyzes reviews on Amazon is ReviewMeta.com.)
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