Nearly one million reviews written on Tripadvisor last year have turned out to be false, according to a report by the company itself.

It reports the British newspaper The Guardian.

According to Tripadvisor's report, the website has stopped about 67 percent of the reviews from being published.

The reviews must have been bought or written by the companies themselves.

The false reviews make up about 3.6 percent of all reviews.

As a result, Tripadvisor has penalized 34,605 ​​different properties, such as hotels, and shut down 20,999 members.  

Calls for breaches of restrictions

According to the report, the number of reviews has halved during the pandemic.

And in addition to the number of false reviews, the company's moderators have had to manually review approximately 257,000 reviews, and delete approximately 46,000 for violating the company's comment rules.  

This applies to comments that have urged others not to follow the restrictions of different countries, not to test themselves and spread misinformation about the virus.

The issue of ranking and consumer reviews has recently been investigated in the light of an EU directive.

The investigation proposes, among other things, new rules in the Marketing Act which mean that companies will be obliged to inform about how they ensure that a review comes from a customer who has actually used the product they are reviewing.

Is there any way to call scam reviews?

Start the clip to hear Jan Bertoft, Secretary General of the Swedish Consumer Agency, about how to think when reading customer reviews online.