Question 1

How do fake reviews actually work, and how do you spot them?

Accepted Answer

Through an **industrial supply chain** rather than isolated dishonesty — brokers, private groups, refund schemes and reviewer farms — and the scale is large enough that regulators in several countries have made writing, commissioning or hosting them unlawful.

**How they are actually produced:**

**Incentivised reviews**, where a buyer purchases the product, leaves a positive review, and is **refunded privately** — which defeats verified-purchase badges entirely, because the purchase was genuine.

**Broker networks**, recruiting reviewers through messaging groups and coordinating campaigns.

**Account farms**, using aged or hijacked accounts with genuine history to avoid detection.

**Review hijacking**, where an old listing with many reviews is edited to sell a completely different product, inheriting the rating.

**Negative campaigns** against competitors, which are harder to detect and more damaging.

**Generated text**, which has made volume trivial and detection harder — though it has also produced the distinctive tell of reviews that read as though written by nobody in particular.

**What actually indicates manipulation:**

**The distribution, not the average.** Genuine products accumulate a spread. **A pattern of almost all five-star and a few one-star, with little in between, is the classic signature** of positive manipulation plus genuine unhappy buyers.

**Timing clusters** — many reviews within a short window, particularly after a quiet period.

**Vagueness.** Fake reviews praise without specifics: "great product, works well, fast delivery". Real ones mention the awkward detail, the thing that arrived damaged, the use case.

**Repeated phrasing** across reviews, including the product's full marketing name rather than what people call it.

**Reviewer history** — accounts reviewing many unrelated products, all positively, in a short period.

**Mismatched product**, where reviews describe something else entirely.

**What to do instead:** read the **middling reviews**, which are the most informative; sort by recent; read the negative ones for the specific failure mode; and check whether complaints repeat.

**The regulatory position** now treats fake reviews as an unfair commercial practice, with obligations on platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent and remove them.

Question 2

How do online marketplace and second-hand selling scams work?

Accepted Answer

Almost all of them exploit the same structural weakness: getting one party to give up money or goods before the other side of the exchange is irreversible. Recognising that pattern identifies nearly

Question 3

What actually happens when you report someone?

Accepted Answer

Your report enters a queue and is assessed against the platform's rules — not against whether the content upset you, which is the source of most disappointment with the outcome. The process:

Question 4

How do you spot fake followers?

Accepted Answer

Through patterns that are difficult to fake convincingly at scale — and the signals are consistent enough that auditing an account is genuinely possible without specialist tools. The most informative

Question 5

How does content moderation actually work at scale?

Accepted Answer

Through a layered system combining automation and human review, because the volume makes anything else impossible. Major platforms process billions of items daily. The layers: Automated detection at

Question 6

What is the difference between UGC and influencer content?

Accepted Answer

Where the content is published, and what is being bought. Influencer content is posted on the creator's own channel to their audience; user-generated content (UGC) is created for a brand to use on

Question 7

What is astroturfing and how do you spot it?

Accepted Answer

Astroturfing is creating a false impression of grassroots support — hence the name, artificial grass. It disguises coordinated activity by an organisation, company or state as spontaneous public

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