Meta is fined $17 billion. Why should review sites - and the businesses that use them - be concerned?

The face of a man who has just been let off the hook? We are not so sure

Hot on the heels of the New Mexico court fining them $567 million earlier this month, bringing the total in that case to just shy of $1 billion, Meta has now been ordered to pay all 52 US states their share of a nearly $18 billion settlement. 

Now, the cynics - and a few realists - among us will say, "Well, they can afford that anyway; after all, the business is currently valued by the market at just shy of $1.5 trillion." And they would be right - in part. We won't be seeing the back of Facebook or Instagram any time soon. But with Meta's share price currently trading 23 per cent lower than it was 12 months ago, this action and fine cannot have been welcomed at 1 Hacker Way. 

There must be some reputational damage for both Meta and TikTok, as well as Alphabet, the owners of YouTube; Meta depends on advertising spend for over 97 per cent of its revenue (Alphabet derives just over 75% of its revenue from advertisements), and there are bound to be some mutterings in agencies and their clients' boardrooms as to the desirability of climbing into bed - or remaining in bed - with a business that has been compared, by a state supreme court judge, to "a factory, with advertising and content as its product and the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated."

All these social media businesses were launched on the back of Web 2.0, itself driven by President Clinton's arguably naive decision to enact Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in the United States, which exempts social media companies from responsibility for user-posted content on their platforms. 

Parents and siblings of nearly 600 children who they allege died as a result of engagement with social media, protesting outside the courthouse in Oakland, California. 

One might even argue that these businesses let the protection of Section 230 go to their corporate heads, encouraging them to allow all kinds of frankly corrosive antisocial content and interaction at the mild end of the scale and the downright harmful, right up to and including users' lives (as these courts have begun deciding - under pressure from parents' and responsible citizens' groups) at the other. Which leads us to our answer to the question posed in the second part of the headline of this article.

What does all this have to do with reviews?

What is happening now, precisely thirty years on, is that legislators and courts are increasingly concluding that businesses must take responsibility for what they have allowed their platforms to become. Meta will doubtless appeal, but there are few parents of teenage children out there who, regardless of the ultimate outcome of this and other cases in the pipeline, would argue that it is a universal force for good in its current form.

Likewise, review sites and platforms. We can all agree that allowing children to come to harm is a bad thing. We would also suggest that platforms that host reviews and promote those reviews as worthy of the trust of consumers when they are then found wanting (as Trustpilot has recently been) in that respect are equally as guilty, albeit in the main of colluding with businesses to unfairly enhance the business's reputation to the detriment of the consumer and law-abiding competitor businesses. 

This kind of behaviour, whilst unlikely to result in deaths, must result* in people being misled into using the wrong...

• Financial Adviser

• Medical practitioner

• Legal adviser

• Estate agent

* 'Must result': every review platform on the planet markets itself on the basis that looking good and scoring well will drive more business to the business concerned; if that is the case - and we would say it most definitely is - then the reverse must be true: businesses that use mechanisms to artificially inflate their scores must attract consumers away from honest businesses.

...and so on. We are sure you get our drift. Being misled into using a business that is playing fast and loose with reviews to look better at what it does than it would if it obeyed the law is not a trivial matter. 

The world of online reviews has similarly 'benefited' from Section 230. Online review platforms have hidden behind phrases like 'freedom of speech' and 'the public good' for far too long. In the same way that Facebook, Instagram and TikTok could easily have diverted some of their massive profits - those profits, by the way, make the economics of running a Colombian drug cartel look like hard labour by comparison - to ensuring standards of probity and behaviour on their sites. Instead, they made them into the kind of swamp no right-minded person would want their mother-in-law to enter, let alone rely on.

Now these days we all spend enough time on social media to know that there is a very wide range of opinions of what is acceptable and what is not. But what relevance does this have for reviews? We would argue that this level of tolerance for language that no person would use in a face-to-face conversation is now seen in reviews and in Google's own responses to appeals from businesses who find themselves being harmed by such language. 

Google has made it far more difficult for businesses to challenge reviews based on foul language or insults - directed at the business or, in many cases, to individual members of staff. Manual processing of reporting and appeals has increasingly been taken away from humans and delegated to AI. The same goes for sites such as Trustpilot.

What does this shift mean for businesses?

It means that negative reviews, whatever their merit or lack thereof, are far more likely to remain on whatever platform they have been posted on, whether that be Google or any of the review sites. 

This, in turn, makes it imperative that businesses:

 1.  Do everything in their power to initiate the review themselves (reviewers use far milder language when the review has been prompted by the business, and they will often ameliorate their score as well). 

2.   Employ independent moderation (more below) to resolve errors of fact or misleading statetments before they are published, anywhere, but especially on Google

That does not mean that businesses have to invite every known 'Mr/Mrs/Ms Angry' to write a review, but it does mean giving them a mechanism to do so (not doing so will see the business in default of the CMA's core regulations). Here's an example:

That button gives the business the moral ascendancy: 'We did invite you to write a review/you could have gone to our website at any time and written a review.'

Moderation now becomes absolutely imperative, especially for professional and service businesses. Businesses now have to assume that most customers, especially those prone to venting, will find a platform to exercise that inclination, be it Facebook or Reddit, Google or Trustpilot. Best to allow them to do it through the business's own website, where their post will benefit from moderation.

Moderation

Our clients know all about moderation, and regular readers will know plenty about it, but for those new to HelpHound, here's a brief synopsis of the process

1.  The business initiates the review, preferably by email, or the customer (or other stakeholder*) follows the button highlighted in the screenshot above

2.  The review is written

3.  Our moderator - a human, not AI - reads the review

4.  If any errors of fact or potentially misleading comments are identified, our moderator reverts to the reviewer, allowing them an opportunity to correct their review

5.  The review is published on our client's website

6. The reviewer is sent a link enabling them to copy their review to Google

The net effect? By injecting the invitation element, more satisfied customers will write reviews and, importantly, far fewer less-than-happy customers will write factually incorrect, unreasonable, downright rude, or potentially misleading reviews. It is often the case that the act of moderation will actually save a customer who might otherwise never have used the business again.

The numbers prove this point beyond a shadow of a doubt:

• 73 in 1,000 reviews require intervention by a moderator

• Of those 73, sixty-five will accept the moderator's invitation to modify their review

The results? Something along these lines. First, on the business's website:

One additional key point: although reviewers may choose to use a nickname or avatar, both HelpHound and the business know their real identities. This ensures the reviews are an honest and genuine reflection of their experience of the business under review. Adding value for everyone concerned - future customers, the business and Google

Next, on Google:

We should also  say that any foul language, rude comments about staff or threats of any kind are against HelpHound's terms and conditions, so they won't make it into print either, on the client's site or on Google 

In conclusion

Businesses cannot wait for governments to act (although see below!); they must take their own review management in hand and ensure, for the benefit of all - customers, staff, suppliers, shareholders and stakeholders of every kind - that they have the most effective solution in place.

This article details the new powers that UK regulators have been given to investigate and punish businesses, in much the same way as the Italian regulators have in the Trustpilot case. There has never been more urgency for businesses to adopt effective and compliant review management.