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Flagging reviews is crucial for businesses to remove fake or excessively aggressive and unfair feedback. Ensuring the legitimacy of flagged reviews is essential. Typically, this process is done manually by agents based on information provided by the business, which requires time and money for platforms to operate.
However, there's a risk: businesses might abuse this system by flagging all negative reviews in the hope of getting them removed. An analysis revealed that most reviews flagged by companies on Trustpilot were negative, while Trustpilot’s own flagged reviews were predominantly positive, both flagged for similar reasons such as unverified purchases or irrelevance .
While platforms usually verify flagged reviews both automatically and manually, which incurs time and costs, it's still fair and healthy for the platform to allow businesses this option within reasonable limits.
A review should only be flagged if the purchase was not verified, the content is hateful, or it doesn’t apply to the company or service.
- Verified purchases: Ensuring a review is legitimate is best achieved through purchase verification (see “Fake reviews”).
- Semantic analysis: Using semantic analysis can help flag hateful speech, though validation should likely remain manual to ensure accuracy.
“Can you trust Trustpilot? – 9 million reviews studied”, Richman SEO Training, 2019