Fake reviews are illegal and subject to big fines under new FTC rules
Will this include manipulated reviews?<p>Take Airbnb, which became personal for me when I found out my reviews (of 3 and 4 stars) were edited or deleted.  And where the last few Airbnb's were generally not good experiences (toilet requiring physically pushing stuff down, another one where bed was adjacent to wall with elevator machinery, another with 3 restaurants outside the ground floor courtyard including seating outside the house).<p>I discovered that in the Airbnb subreddit, hosts have common tips for how to remove bad reviews.  Easy, just say that it violates the guidelines because: "there is a complaint about something the host cannot control"<p>That's it.  It's that easy, and now information discovery by the consumer becomes difficult, as they see 4.8 star reviews with glowing positivity.<p>I'm skeptical but that's what they need to crack down on, that grey area where you make fake/arbitrary guidelines for reviews and ONLY delete the negatives.<p>Same thing happened to me on Amazon, I had pickling jars that all universally cracked in the fridge, and my review was deleted because it violated guidelines.<p>It's not just a bot or fake sponsorship issue, it's also a biased sampling game:  delete the negative, leave the positive.