{"id":641,"date":"2004-08-16T04:29:54","date_gmt":"2004-08-16T08:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/metasj\/2004\/08\/16\/more-on-the-fake-reviewer-industry\/"},"modified":"2004-08-16T04:29:54","modified_gmt":"2004-08-16T08:29:54","slug":"more-on-the-fake-reviewer-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2004\/08\/16\/more-on-the-fake-reviewer-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"More on the fake reviewer industry"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Sorry, this has me fascinated against my will, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Visiting Yahoo! just to read bad movie reviews
\nis becoming an addiction. This is a massive, elaborate subculture which I would never have noticed, had I not run across a clearly-fake review from a reviewer with an extensive and articulate review history. The plants review on all the major review sites, visit many popular movie blogs, and, one presumes, work to land “on the street” TV interviews and other “random” spots.<\/p>\n

I feel as disillusioned as I did last week when I browed “Yahoo groups<\/a>” by category last week for the first time… and discovered that over half<\/b> of the hundreds of thousands<\/i> of groups are semipublic groups with names like “ctevyewkprku” and descriptions like “The island of the sun – welcomely.” … which are presumably involved in some kind of spam or porn toolchain.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Yahoo Movies, which normally summarizes 10-20 major reviews, converts their different ranking schemes to an A-F scale, and lists five of these on the film overview page, gave the film a weekend-long pass by waiting three days before summarizing critics’ reviews. <\/p>\n

Here’s my new favorite review:<\/p>\n

\nSimply different<\/b>
\n
\nby runjcutta<\/b> Aug 13, 2004
\n
\nNo Doubt that AVP can’t match the original classics like Predator and Alien. The one thing i didn’t like about the movie is that the Predator wasn’t the way it used to be. The new director didn’t exactly try to rewrite the movies, he just altered it. The rest of the movie was very fascinating. I didn’t exactly know to scream or to cry.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whoever created the account writes like a careless high-schooler — and no doubt there are bored teens who get their jollies by creating fifty yahoo! accounts and bashing or promoting a least\/favorite film — but is obviously clever and appreciates a little higher mathematics now and then (cf. Runge-Kutta<\/a>).
\nSo innocuous, and yet… suggestive of such layered deceit.
\nI’ll guess this was cut-and-pasted from a list of ‘suitable reviews’ that was autogenerated or split up among many different people.<\/p>\n

A few more tips for the would-be plant<\/b>:<\/p>\n