One of the most common questions that gets asked of Aged Care Reviews is: How do you stop fake reviews?
Stopping fake reviews is at the heart of our promise to aged care consumers and their families to facilitate informed decision making. Its also the number one concern of aged care operators engaging through our platform.
Our cornerstone document on review content integrity is our Content Guidelines. These are our rules of play.
Our Content Guidelines state a review:
- must relate to an aged care experience in the 48 months prior to the review;
- cannot come from a staff member or ex staff member;
- cannot use racist or inappropriate language;
- cannot identify a specific resident or staff member; and
- cannot be posted by a competing operator.
So, what’s involved in screening of reviews?
Our process starts with our Sophisticated Content Detection Algorithm (SCDA). In short, the SCDA is a piece of proprietary code that we developed and have updated over time. The SCDA looks at a vast range of different identifiers in a new review submission.
The identifiers look at things like who has submitted the review, their email address, the reviewer’s location, whether the reviewer has submitted a review in the past, the star rating the reviewer has given, how that star rating compares to our historic bell curve of ratings, the words and phrases used by the review, and the pattern of reviews for a particular facility or operator.
Each identifier is given a risk weighted score, with a total score then applied to the review. This score determines whether a review gets posted online immediately, or flagged for further investigation.
If a review is flagged for further investigation, our team will typically email the reviewer to ask for more information on their aged care experience.
Regardless of the SCDA, all reviews are manually inspected (i.e. by a human) within 24 hours of submission.
Above and beyond this process, any person is able to flag a particular review for further investigation. When this process is triggered we will re-look at the review, the SCDA scoring, and what, if any, other information we have about the reviewer and their experience.
The process and system used by Aged Care Reviews is on-par with other world leading review websites, including CanadianPharmacyRatings, TripAdvisor and Yelp.
So what do you think we should be looking out for in fake reviews? Have you had an experience where you thought a review may be fake? What raised your suspicions?
