How do you get fake reviews removed?

From hairdressers to literature, these days we order and book everything online. Reviews left by other users are a great help in doing so. How do you choose between the hundreds of toasters on an online marketplace, or the endless list of carrot cake recipes? Without a personal recommendation we regularly base that choice on how often a product has been given five stars and on the flaws earlier buyers point out in their reviews. For businesses and suppliers those ratings matter just as much. They increase a product’s visibility and its appeal to new buyers, think of the ‘sort by best rated’ function.

Unfortunately reviews are not always (entirely) genuine. By now we are all familiar with the phenomenon of fake news, but more and more businesses are falling victim to fake reviews. Negative reviews from strangers who have never been customers and have no motive for the review they posted. Or people who have been customers, but who put (partly) inaccurate and unfair information online. It works the other way round too: sellers who post, or have posted, large numbers of false positive reviews to attract consumers, which is bad for the customer, the marketplace and the competition alike. How do you recognise this kind of false review? And what can you do about it?

How do you recognise false reviews?

Positive reviews

There are several categories of false review, with varying degrees of detectability. The easiest to spot are reviews posted by bots, often generated with the help of artificial intelligence. Usually these take the form of a large number of positive reviews on the poster’s own products, or a large number of negative reviews on a competitor’s. Such reviews can be recognised in a number of ways. They are often strikingly similar in writing style and content. They tend not to get beyond vague terms such as ‘brilliant’ or ‘best product I have ever used’ without naming any specific features. They may also contain odd machine translations. On top of that, the accounts they are posted from are often empty; on Instagram that might mean the account has no posts or followers of its own. The reviews may also have been posted from a foreign IP address, which is particularly suspicious in the case of small local businesses.

Harder to spot are false reviews written by people. These may be freelancers earning a little on the side by writing positive reviews for products. It may also be that certain companies ask their employees to review their own products on sales platforms. But you can also think of someone who has just opened a hairdressing salon and asks their friends to post positive reviews on a booking site without ever having been customers. Here too there are a number of things to watch for: if the account in question has posted no other reviews, if the name cannot be found online, if there is a mismatch between the characteristics of the review and the product concerned (an Australian reviewing a garden centre in a small Dutch village, say, or a woman rating a barber’s shop), or if the language used is either wildly exaggerated or conspicuously vague.

Negative reviews

Although false positive reviews of this kind are of course a nuisance for competitors and consumers, it is above all false negative reviews that are a serious problem. It is extremely easy for strangers to post an angry review, for example through a maps service, about a business where they have never been a customer. Here you can look for the same features as above.

The most difficult are reviews from people who genuinely have been customers, but who set out inaccurate information in their review. An example: a painting firm is hired to paint all the internal walls of a new house red. The clients then regret the choice of colour and ask the firm to repaint the walls in a different colour free of charge. When the firm refuses, the clients get angry and post a furious review. “Utterly unprofessional. The walls were not the colour we wanted and the painters refused to redo it. Do not do business with these people, they are rip-off merchants!” With reviews of this kind it is hard to separate the genuine from the false, because these are actual customers. Usually only the business itself is in a position to separate the wheat from the chaff. Because outsiders cannot readily tell when such a review is false, reviews of this kind are often the most damaging to a business’s reputation.

Fake reviews have been expressly prohibited since 2022

For a long time there was no provision that prohibited fake reviews in so many words. That changed on 28 May 2022. On that date the Dutch implementing act for the modernisation of consumer protection entered into force, bringing Directive (EU) 2019/2161 into the Dutch Civil Code.

Since then fake reviews appear on the blacklist in Article 6:193g of the Dutch Civil Code, the list of commercial practices that are misleading in all circumstances. Two limbs were added for that purpose:

• Limb z prohibits stating that reviews come from consumers who have actually used or bought the product, without taking reasonable and proportionate steps to check whether that is the case.
• Limb aa prohibits submitting, or commissioning another party to submit, false consumer reviews or endorsements, and misrepresenting consumer reviews or social media endorsements, in order to promote products.

The fact that this is a blacklist makes a considerable difference. With an ordinary misleading commercial practice you have to show that the average consumer could actually have been misled. With the blacklist that is established in advance. The consumer can rescind the contract of sale and claim damages.

The Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets also supervises this area. For a breach of the blacklist the fine can run up to ten per cent of annual turnover (Article 2.15 of the Dutch Consumer Protection Enforcement Act). That is no longer a theoretical risk.

The practical consequence for businesses is this: if you collect reviews yourself, you must be able to explain what measures you take to check that a reviewer really was a customer. If you do not actively invite your customers to review you, that duty to check weighs more heavily still.

How can you tackle false reviews?

Writing to the platform hosting the review

To regulate automatically generated reviews, most sales platforms have algorithms that detect and remove this kind of review automatically. Amazon, which is plagued by false reviews, spent over 500 million dollars in 2019 alone on detecting and reducing fraud and abuse. Although platforms often manage to trace and remove a substantial proportion of the reviews, it frequently takes too long. Research shows that Amazon removes one in three false reviews, but often only 100 days after posting. For businesses with a smaller budget this becomes far more complicated still.

Where the origin of a review is unclear, there is little point in trying to contact the reviewer. It makes more sense to contact whoever manages the reviews, so the maps service in the case of a maps review.

Such operators often have a notice-and-takedown policy, which means you have to flag the review yourself and the operator then assesses it. Here you can look to the platform’s terms and conditions, which often contain a clause requiring reviews to be based on genuine, first-hand experience. In the case of maps reviews, the review policy states that content must reflect how you experienced the location and may not be posted purely to influence a place’s rating. Nor may the same content be posted more than once or from multiple accounts.

Where one of those conditions is not met, you can ask the operator to remove the review. You do that from your business account: go to your business profile, click on ‘reviews’, find the false review and report it. You also have the option of flagging an entire profile. You will have to substantiate that the review does not meet the operator’s conditions, which is not always straightforward. Note that with an operator other than the one in the example, you should have the right terms and conditions to hand.

If the request to remove the false reviews is not granted, you can send the operator a letter of claim. A letter of claim may already have the desired effect, given that the operator is unlikely to want proceedings. It does matter that there is demonstrable harm. With larger operators a letter of claim will probably have little effect. As a last resort you can issue proceedings.

How much point there is in that depends entirely on your case. One successful example is a case from 2019. A tailor’s shop had received a number of negative reviews on a maps service over a period of several months and claimed that the operator remove them. The court found for the tailor and the reviews had to be removed. This concerned more than ten reviews of a similar tone. The names under which the reviews were written were unknown to the tailor. Research into those names turned up nothing either, except in the case of two of them, which belonged to the founders of a well-known band. The reviews also described services the tailor’s shop did not provide at all, such as taking in a wedding dress. On top of that it was established that the bad reviews were damaging the shop’s good name.

In assessing whether proceedings are worthwhile, it is important that you can make it sufficiently plausible both that the reviews are false and that there is demonstrable harm. Things to watch for are sharp increases in negative reviews where you normally receive positive ones, a high degree of similarity between those reviews, reviewers whose identity cannot be traced, or reviews in a foreign language where you operate locally only.

Writing to the reviewer

Where genuine customers have posted an unfair or inaccurate review, the operator will be less inclined to remove it. Operators tend to say in their terms that they do not get involved in disagreements between businesses and customers, because there is no reliable way of determining who is right about a particular customer experience. Proving that a review is false, rather than simply one you disagree with, is often difficult.

That is why it can be worthwhile to contact the reviewer first. If the request to amend or remove the review is not granted, you can move on to a letter of claim and possibly proceedings. There is a chance the reviewer will take the review down, for instance because they are worried about the legal consequences. Bear in mind, though, that sending a letter of claim can also add fuel to the fire with a customer who was already dissatisfied. The situation could then get worse. Above all it is sensible to ask yourself whether the trouble and cost of proceedings outweigh the reputational harm you have suffered. Something else that can help is encouraging customers to write reviews, so that the false review is diluted and, with luck, gradually recedes into the background.

Positive reviews on a competitor’s page

It may also be that you have not fallen victim to negative reviews yourself, but that a competitor is receiving a strikingly large number of positive ones. Where that means the competing product rises more easily in search results, that can be very annoying. The Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets has indicated that it wants to tackle practices of this kind. Its director has said that the deliberate use of fake reviews, fake likes and fake followers damages consumers’ trust in the internet as a marketplace.

Since the 2022 change in the law it is settled that this practice is prohibited. The rules on unfair commercial practices are written primarily to protect the consumer, so as a competitor you will have to look to the general law of tort. In the case law that route has by now proved viable. It remains important to record precisely what is wrong with the reviews: posted before a service was launched, coming from connected persons, or showing strikingly similar patterns. Record that with screenshots and timestamps.

Conclusion

False reviews are a growing problem, but the legal position has become considerably stronger in recent years. Since May 2022 fake reviews have appeared in so many words on the blacklist of misleading commercial practices, and that saves a great deal of argument about whether there really was any misleading going on.

A first step remains to identify whether you are dealing with genuine customers describing a false experience, or with people (or bots) who were never customers at all.

If they are genuine customers, it can pay to contact the reviewer yourself first. If that does not lead to a solution, you can move on to a letter of claim and possibly proceedings. If they are fake customers, you can flag the reviews with the operator and ask for removal under its notice-and-takedown policy. There too the further steps of a letter of claim and proceedings remain open.

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In collaboration with Saar Hoek