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Travel platform accused of ripping millions of reviews from other sites
Mafengwo denies the accusation, calling it an "organized attack"
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Why you can trust SCMP
This article originally appeared on ABACUS
Vacation planning today often involves reading comments on travel review sites, hoping to learn from genuine and honest insights left by real guests and tourists who’ve been before us. But what if those reviews were just copied or fabricated?
A public WeChat account under the name of Xiaosheng Bibi, which writes mainly about tech, claims that over 7,400 accounts on Mafengwo -- a widely-used travel platform in China -- contain content lifted from other sites. Citing data crawled by data analysis startup Hooray Data, it claims that as many as 18 million reviews were copied from Mafengwo's Chinese rivals such as Ctrip and Meituan Dianping, with others being translated reviews from Agoda and Yelp.
In a statement posted on Weibo, Mafengwo said that the article was an “organized attack” based on distorted facts. It is suing Hooray Data for "reputational damage" in a Beijing court, according to Chinese media.
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Hooray Data did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
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The manager of the Xiaosheng Bibi account told us he was approached by Hooray Data, who entrusted him to expose the numbers -- and said they have another related article coming later Monday. The first article was widely circulated on social media, with one Weibo page about the topic drawing more than 19 million views.
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