Shouldn’t we be able to trust online opinions?

Posted on September 1st 2010, by Jeremy Kroll

“Discerning Internet users know that glowing online reviews of things like books or restaurants cannot always be trusted.”  That’s the first sentence of last week’s New York Times story on the Reverb Communications settlement. (Reverb, a P.R. firm, apparently had its employees pose as ordinary consumers and plant positive reviews of its clients’ games in the iTunes store.)

The Times, of course, is right. We are so used to calculating whether online reviews are real — and more broadly whether people and organizations represent themselves honestly online — that we don’t even think about it anymore. It’s as if our online lives put us in a constant state of low-grade suspicion and mistrust.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this issue and working on ways to fix it — in fact, we’re building a practical technology solution that individuals and organizations with similar concerns should find quite helpful. It’ll be a better day when we can trust that people are representing themselves honestly online.