The inevitable corruption of social systems on the web

An interesting CNBC research article, “Amazon is filled with fake reviews and it’s getting harder to spot them”, exposes a long-standing problem: the sharp decline in the quality of Amazon reviews as a result of companies buying positive assessments for their products or negative ones for competing products on Facebook and other social networks.

Beyond the specific case of Amazon — which has recently suffered similar problems with Amazon’s Choice — the problem of the corruption of social systems on the web is, for me as a researcher, fascinating: as soon as a social-based metric, be it ratings, likes, favorites, followers or any other, acquires a certain popularity, schemes aimed at obtaining a profit by falsifying and distorting it automatically appear. As soon as a network or a scheme with a social base reaches a certain level of popularity, clandestine services destined to sell fake reviews proliferate on it, quickly finding interested parties willing to pay for them, and which end up, if no decisive action is taken, destroying the site’s value proposition.