Paid review and paid writer detection

Abstract

There has been a surge in opinion-sharing in the public domain. Some opinions greatly influence our decisions, e.g., the choice of purchase. Malicious parties or individuals exploit social media by generating fake reviews for opinion manipulation. This paper aims to investigate the phenomenon of online paid restaurant reviews by bloggers. Our research provides an insight into some characteristics of paid reviews and their authors. We then explore a set of features based on our observations and detect paid reviews and paid bloggers using supervised machine learning techniques. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach.