Tripadvisor says it's catching more fake reviews

Tripadvisor has revealed that approximately 4% of its 30 million reviews were deemed to be fake or fraudulent in 2022.

In its latest Review Transparency Report, the company said its detection process picked up 72% of submissions before they were published on the platform, up five percentage points on its 2020 figure.

The report, published every two years, also reveals that 2.3 million reviews were manually investigated by Tripadvisor moderators.

The above 2.3 million figure includes some of the 1.3 million or 4% of reviews that were removed but not all as a portion were removed automatically.

Tripadvisor also revealed that it removed more than 24,000 reviews associated with paid review companies from the platform with almost half originating from India, Russia, the United States, Turkey, Italy and Vietnam.

The company also dished out ranking penalties to more than 33,000 businesses for fraud.

Becky Foley, vice president of trust and safety at Tripadvisor, said: “Platforms like ours are built on trust, so we never stop learning and improving our systems to ensure our community has access to honest, accurate content. The findings from this report show that our approach is working; we’re catching a higher proportion of fraudulent content before it is published, with nearly three-quarters of fake reviews never even making it to the platform.”

According to its 2021 report, the company rejected or removed more than 2 million reviews in 2020, representing about 9% of all submissions.

Approximately 1 million of those were deemed fraudulent.