Chinese travel platform Mafengwo denies faking reviews after social media storm
- The pressure of maintaining positive write-ups has seen the rise of fake reviews
- Merchants have been banned from e-commerce platforms for the practice
Chinese travel platform Mafengwo, known mainly for its millennial user base of independent travellers, has denied that it uses fake reviews on its site after a social media report accused it of copying review content from competitors and fabricating as much as 85 per cent of reviews on its platform.
In a statement published on its corporate Weibo account on Monday, the company said that reviews of restaurants and eateries made up less than 3 per cent of the user-generated content in the Mafengwo ecosystem, which includes travel itineraries, diary entries and photo-sharing.
“Taking into account our total number of users, the number of accounts posting fake reviews is minuscule and Mafengwo has since removed such accounts,” Mafengwo said in the statement. “The number of [fake] users described in the media report has large discrepancies compared to reality and third-party statistics.”
The report which sparked the furore came from a social media account on WeChat under the name of XiaoShengBiBi, which accused the company of using bots and hiring writers to copy hundreds of thousands of reviews from rivals such as Ctrip, Meituan-Dianping, Agoda and Yelp.
Platforms like Mafengwo and competitors such as travel booking platform Ctrip and restaurant review sites from Meituan-Dianping offer booking and reservation services to users who can also leave reviews of a hotel or restaurant they have been to. In the internet age, consumers often take into account prior reviews before making their choice of what travel experience or restaurant to book, making positive reviews a must-have for merchants to attract customers.