Here are parts of the interview:

HOW TO TELL FAKE FROM REAL

With fake reviews being churned out easily and on a large scale, how can one tell a bogus review from a legitimate one?

Mr Simon Yap, the web development director of Oasis Web Asia, a web development company, said some websites such as reviewmeta.com can help to analyse the online reviews in that regard.

What consumers can do is to copy the URL of the reviewed product and paste it on the website, which would run a report on the review.

“There’d be some percentage of suspicious reviews that would be removed by the analyser,” explained Mr Yap.

“Suspicious reviewers are normally reviewers who’ve created accounts just to review the particular product or brand … or there are a lot of repeated words to promote the product, which (the analysis) picked out as suspicious.”

Such website analysers are not 100 per cent accurate, however, and do not work on all platforms, such as TripAdvisor, one of the largest travel sites in the world, with more than 630 million reviews.

Read more at https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/army-fake-reviews-online-taobao-amazon-tripadvisor-sales-10448454