One of the features of the second internet boom is a greater use of, and reliance on, user-generated content, including user reviews of products. Paying for positive reviews undermines the credibility of user reviews and in the UK such behaviour is illegal.
An advert appeared on Amazon's Mechanical Turk website, which offers people pieces of work. It asked people to post positive reviews and undermine negative ones. The advert offered 65 cents for each review. The company has apologised for the incident.
"It was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment," said a statement from Mark Reynoso, president of Belkin.
"We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction. We regard our responsibility to our user community as sacred, and we are extremely sorry that this happened," he said.
The company said that it was trying to remove any posts which resulted from the cash offer. The reviews were of a wireless router which has otherwise received very poor user reviews.
The online solicitation to write good reviews asked for five-out-of-five, 100% ratings and asked reviewers to mark as 'unhelpful' any negative reviews of the product.
Belkin said that it is still investigating the matter, though news reports have named the person responsible for the Mechanical Turk offer as Belkin business development executive Mike Bayard.
The case has shone a light on user reviews and some companies' involvement in fake positive reviews.
This week The New York Times reported on one of its readers' experiences with online backup service Carbonite. While on hold to the company after the service failed to work online, the reader, Bruce Goldensteinberg, investigated the company online.
Goldensteinberg found a cluster of reviews of the service on Amazon all appearing around the same date in 2006 and all from around the Boston area, where Carbonite is based.
Goldensteinberg identified two of the reviews as being from Carbonite's vice president of marketing and its senior software engineer.
"These ‘reviews’ on Amazon from 2006 should have sourced the authors as Carbonite employees," Carbonite chief executive David Friend told the New York Times. "I will personally see that the reviews are updated to disclose their employment affiliation. Had they been brought to my attention, they would have been removed long ago. We do have a policy about such things. I apologize to anyone who was mislead by these postings.”
In Europe it is illegal for a company to commission glowing reviews for its own products if they create the false impression that they were written by consumers. In the UK the rule is found in the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations. Company directors face a maximum penalty of two years in prison if convicted of breaching the Regulations which came into force in May 2008.
