Trust in information on
the web is being damaged by the huge numbers of people paid by companies
to post comments online, say researchers.
Fake posters can "poison" debate and make people unsure about who they can trust, the study suggests.
Some firms have created tens of thousands of fake accounts to flood chat forums and skew debate.
The researchers say there are reliable ways to spot fakes and urge websites to do more to police users.
The researchers from Canada and China say paying people to
post comments is an "interesting strategy in business marketing" but it
is not a benign activity.
"Paid posters may create a significant negative effect on the
online communities, since the information from paid posters is usually
not trustworthy," they wrote.
Battles
In some cases, rival companies have used competing armies of
workers to wage comment wars that confused members of the public looking
for unbiased information.
The researchers say the fake comments can overwhelm some
users, causing them to find it hard to trust any information found
online.
They give the example of a spike in activity on a World of Warcraft chat forum on the Chinese website Baidu.
A thread titled "Junpeng Jia, your mother asked you to go
back home for dinner!" received over 300,000 replies over a two day
period.
A PR company later claimed it had employed 800 individuals to
run 20,000 separate accounts on the site to help maintain interest in
the videogame while it was down for maintenance.
Growing problem
While the practice of flooding forums with fake comments is
most widespread in China, where such posters are called the Internet
Water Army, it is becoming common in other nations too.
The US military is known to use fakes to infiltrate chat forums to gather information about potential terror groups.
Similarly many Facebook pages are plagued by bogus friends and "social bots" that are used to stage debates.
Many marketing firms also seed forums with comments in a bid to create "viral" interest in a company or event.
However, fakes can be spotted by analysing their patterns of activity and the words they use, say the researchers.
Fakes are more likely to start new comment threads, make
inane comments rather than add to a debate, and repeat former comments
with minor changes, the study suggests.
The researchers say they are refining software tools to help website administrators tackle the "painful" problem.
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