Uncovering Crowdsourced Manipulation of Online Reviews

Online reviews are a cornerstone of consumer decision making. However, their authenticity and quality has proven hard to control, especially as polluters target these reviews toward promoting products or in degrading competitors. In a troubling direction, the widespread growth of crowdsourcing platforms like Mechanical Turk has created a large-scale, potentially difficult-to-detect workforce of malicious review writers. Hence, this paper tackles the challenge of uncovering crowdsourced manipulation of online reviews through a three-part effort: (i) First, we propose a novel sampling method for identifying products that have been targeted for manipulation and a seed set of deceptive reviewers who have been enlisted through crowdsourcing platforms. (ii) Second, we augment this base set of deceptive reviewers through a reviewer-reviewer graph clustering approach based on a Markov Random Field where we define individual potentials (of single reviewers) and pair potentials (between two reviewers). (iii) Finally, we embed the results of this probabilistic model into a classification framework for detecting crowd-manipulated reviews. We find that the proposed approach achieves up to 0.96 AUC, outperforming both traditional detection methods and a SimRank-based alternative clustering approach.