Websites that allow customers to review products and services are often criticised for allowing unfair or even fraudulent activity to appear. Trip Advisor has many counts of potential false reviews by hotel rivals. Now it seems that this dark practice has spread to the world of electronics.
Fair-trade officials in Taiwan are looking into reports that Samsung paid people to criticise rival HTC online. Samsung is alleged to have hired students to post negative comments about phones made by Taiwan's HTC.
Samsung, based in South Korea, said the "unfortunate incident" had gone against the company's "fundamental principles".
If found guilty of engaging in "false advertising", Samsung and its local agent could face fines of up to of 25m Taiwanese dollars (£547,000).
Read more here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22166606
Customer review based websites are excellent in my opinion. For example, I always look at Trip Advisor when looking to book hotels in a strange or foreign city. How do such websites prevent false or unfair reviews from appearing? At the same time we do have to allow criticism to appear. If every review had to be approved then all the firms would do is publish positive reviews and reject negative ones.
It has certainly changed consumer behaviour, so it is still a relatively new concept, but in my opinion a welcome one.
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