Astroturf floggers take flack

The EU is starting to look carefully at Astroturfing (fake grass roots support), that bane of crowdsourcing / rating and recommendation plays:

Under laws due to come into force at the beginning of next year, but likely to be delayed until April for the UK, companies posing as consumers on fake blogs, providing fake testimonies on consumer rating websites such as TripAdvisor, or writing fake book reviews on Amazon risk criminal or civil liability.

The new rules are the result of the EU's Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, which is designed to do exactly what it says on the tin. Not only will it impose a general ban on unfair practices, but it will also include two main categories of unfair commercial practice: misleading practices and aggressive practices. Whether a commercial practice is unfair will be assessed in light of the effect it has, or is likely to have, on the average consumer's decision to buy.

The directive catches all commercial organisations - big or small - and the upshot is that companies (including sole traders) will no longer be able to pay individual bloggers or professional agencies to post false or misleading blogs or reviews online. Nor will they be able to do it themselves.

eBay has quite a good system, ie only buyers/sellers can review each other, whereas Amazon is far more prone to this problem.

Although it will prove quite hard in practice to do, we believe this is a good idea, as it helps build trust in web based systems which - frankly - are far too prone to this sort of thing today. It would be good if the US took it seriously too in our view.

Lets hear it for flogging for flacks......