Online Reviews Cannot Be Trusted

One of the great things about the internet is the ability for people to connect with others and share their opinions. You can learn what other people think and you can share what you think about pretty much anything from products to businesses to politics.

While this is a great resource, it can also be very harmful when people post false or inaccurate information. When you read reviews online, you assume true and you hope they can be trusted, but unfortunately this is not the case.

This applies to both good reviews and bad reviews. For example a product may have a lot of good reviews, but it is possible the reviews are fake and have been written just to make a product look good. On the other hand, someone might have a bad experience that has nothing to do with the quality of a product and they leave a bad review for it which makes the product look bad for no reason.

The same goes for businesses, someone may have been upset about something and then they take it out on a business. You never know if what they are saying is true or if they are just trying to make a company look bad. I have seen examples of this first hand where people have written things about a business that are not true, just to try to make it look bad.

So what is the solution? Often review sites such as Google and Yelp will have a way to report a review if there is an issue. The problem is, there is no guarantee anything will be done about it. For example I have reported reviews from time to time for various reasons such as spam or false information and the reviews did not get removed.

This is a problem because when people post reviews that have false information, it can be damaging to a brand or company. When people read these reviews, they assume they are true and this affects their view of what they are reading about.

Review sites need to be more strict about content that is being posted. I know they probably can't moderate every review manually, but there should at least be a better way to report bad information so it can be removed.

We like to think that we can trust the reviews we read online, but unfortunately many of them cannot be trusted, so everyone has to keep this in mind whenever they are reading a review about anything. It may not be as good as the reviews make it out to be, and it may not be as bad as the reviews make it out to be either.