Fake Reviews Legislation in the UK

On 23 May 2024, the UK Parliament passed the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer (DMCC) Act, a landmark development in competition and consumer protection legislation. This comprehensive bill, over a year in the making, is anticipated to take effect in Autumn 2024. It introduces the most significant reforms in over two decades, affecting digital markets, merger control, and consumer law.

Pasabi is pleased to see the Government addressing much needed reform in protecting consumers from the potential harms of fake reviews as part of this Bill. Fake reviews mislead consumers, harm legitimate businesses and are becoming more accessible to fraudsters due to the existence of freely availableAI tools to create them at scale.

Last year, the Department for Business & Trade launched its consultation on "Smarter Regulation: Improving consumer price transparency and product information for consumers". Focusing on 5 key areas, businesses and consumers were invited to comment on:

Display of pricing information 
Hidden fees & drip pricing 
Fake & misleading reviews 
Online platforms 
Online interface orders

Here follows the UK regulator, Competition & Market Authority's(CMA), responses on fake and misleading reviews.

CMA’s commentary on fake & misleading reviews

What reasonable and proportionate steps do you consider traders should take to remove fake reviews and prevent consumers from encountering them?

1. Traders (including online platforms) which publish or provide access to reviews should be explicitly required by law to take or use proactive measures to prevent consumers from encountering fake reviews or from being misled by other information that is influenced or determined by reviews. We recognise that intermediaries which publish other traders’ reviews (such as online platforms) will often not be the authors of fake reviews, so that ‘strict liability’ may be inappropriate. Nevertheless, a ‘reasonable, proportionate and effective’ approach needs to be taken to protect consumers from these harms.

2. The required steps should be designed to address the problem of fake reviews effectively, as these reviews not only mislead consumers but also determine or influence other published information, such as overall ratings, review counts, rankings – enhancing their attractiveness to consumers. It will not be enough for traders merely to engage in a ‘tick box’ exercise of measures; they will need to ensure that their measures are designed and applied to achieve this objective and that they are regularly evaluating their effectiveness, so that the incidence of fake reviews appearing on their sites is minimised. Where traders identify inadequacies in this respect, they must act to address them.

3. The required steps should be designed to address the problem of fake reviews effectively, as these reviews not only mislead consumers but also determine or influence other published information, such as overall ratings, review counts, rankings – enhancing their attractiveness to consumers. It will not be enough for traders merely to engage in a ‘tick box’ exercise of measures; they will need to ensure that their measures are designed and applied to achieve this objective and that they are regularly evaluating their effectiveness, so that the incidence of fake reviews appearing on their sites is minimised. Where traders identify inadequacies in this respect, they must act to address them.

Should traders in scope of these requirements be expected to:

Have proactive detection processes in place to identify suspicious reviews?
Have procedures for removing and preventing consumers from encountering fake reviews?
Sanction users and businesses in response to fake views?

The CMA’s enforcement experience has focussed primarily on dedicated user review websites and larger platforms publishing or providing access to reviews. Our experience has shown that the scale, frequency and rapid dissemination of fake reviews means that it is impossible to address this issue effectively on a reactive case-by-case basis.

Based on our enforcement experience, the CMA agrees that traders which publish or provide access to reviews should take or use appropriate proactive measures to tackle fake reviews and their impacts on aggregated information, rather than relying on, for example, third parties to report problems before acting and addressing content on a piecemeal basis. We would, therefore, expect traders in scope to be able to take or use the measures described below.

5 measures recommended by the CMA

Based on the CMA’s enforcement experience, they have identified measures that they would expect a trader who publishes or provides access to reviews to take or use to prevent reviews from misleading consumers. 

These include: 

Conducting regular risk assessments – traders should take an evidence- led approach to assessing the risks of harm to UK consumers’ economic decision making arising from review-related content and activity and identifying measures to address those risks effectively.
Developing and using appropriate proactive measures to identify and address fake reviews and their impact on other online content. Traders should have systems and processes in place to proactively identify, investigate and respond to fake reviews (whether before or after publication on the trader’s platform). Appropriate responses will include flagging suspicious reviews for investigation, removing reviews that are identified as fake and taking action to remedy the effects of fake review- related activity e.g. correcting review counts and mitigating the impact of fake reviews on other published information such as overall ratings, rankings and endorsements.
Providing third party notification systems – such mechanisms should be clearly and prominently signposted, and should be easy to access and use, enabling third parties (including platform users and enforcement bodies) to effectively report content or activity that might constitute or concern fake reviews.
Applying sanctions to dissuade, deter and where necessary prevent users and other bad actors from engaging in fake review-related activity – sanctions should be effective as a means of dissuading and deterring platform users from submitting fake reviews and third parties from procuring or otherwise arranging for fake reviews for publication on the platform.
Conducting regular internal evaluations – such evaluations are essential to enable traders to regularly assess the effectiveness of the measures that they are taking or using to tackle fake reviews and preventing harm to consumers’ economic interests and identifying further measures to address any inadequacies in this respect.

What reasonable and proportionate steps should traders take to prevent any other information presented on the platform that is determined or influenced by reviews from misleading consumers?

As described above, traders which publish or provide access to reviews must take or use measures to prevent consumers from being misled. Critically, this means not only identifying and tackling fake reviews, but also preventing those reviews from impacting aggregated information such as overall ratings, review counts and rankings. Therefore, traders must ensure that they are taking or using measures to prevent published information that is influenced or determined by reviews – particularly aggregated information - from misleading consumers. 

How Pasabi can help

Pasabi believes in the power of authentic reviews to help consumers make informed decisions and help foster a community of trust between platforms and their customers. This is why we have developed our Platform Audit to support platforms striving to be proactive in tackling the fake reviews challenge.

An audit involves analyzing your data to identify:    

The scale of fake review activity on your platform  
The severity of review risk types 
The presence of review seller behavior 
Potential associated future risks

Following the audit, we will provide you with a comprehensive report outlining our findings, including a detailed breakdown of detected review threats, key takeaways and current trends.

You can choose either: