BBC News - TripAdvisor rebuked over 'trust' claims on review site - 2 views
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1 February 2012 Last updated at 09:59 GMT
TripAdvisor rebuked over 'trust' claims on review site
TripAdvisor has been ordered to rewrite some of its marketing claims by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority.
The ruling follows complaints by hotels that the site had said that its holiday reviews could be "trusted".
The ASA said it was concerned that consumers might be fooled by fraudulent posts since the entries could be made "without any form of verification".
TripAdvisor described the ruling as a "highly technical view" of "copy that was used in a limited capacity".
However, the watchdog said that the ruling served as a warning to all UK-focused sites with user-generated material.
Fraud systemsThe ASA said that the US-based firm's site originally carried statements saying that it contained "reviews that you can trust" and that it had "more than 50 million honest travel reviews".
It said that two hotels and the online reputation firm Kwikchex, which represented others, had complained that the claims were misleading since they could not be substantiated.
The advertising body said it acknowledged that reviewers were asked to sign a declaration that their reviews were real and that they had no incentive or competitive interest with the places commented on.
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Don't major on trustworthiness if fake reviews can appear”
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"This should be regarded as a benchmark ruling which applies to all web sites which make claims about the reliability of their user-created content," the ASA's spokesman Matthew Wilson told the BBC.
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TripAdvisor has been ordered to rewrite some of its marketing claims by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority.
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the social and ethical issue here is reliability. No one can be completely confident that what they see online is true whether it is with traveling companies or something mr brooke showed us in class: http://www.familywatchdog.us/search.asp in this website for example, we can not be sure that the people registered really are sex offenders.