Detecting incentivized review groups with co-review graph

Abstract

Abstract Online reviews play a crucial role in the ecosystem of nowadays business (especially e-commerce platforms), and have become the primary source of consumer opinions. To manipulate consumers’ opinions, some sellers of e-commerce platforms outsource opinion spamming with incentives (e.g., free products) in exchange for incentivized reviews. As incentives, by nature, are likely to drive more biased reviews or even fake reviews. Despite e-commerce platforms such as Amazon have taken initiatives to squash the incentivized review practice, sellers turn to various social networking platforms (e.g., Facebook) to outsource the incentivized reviews. The aggregation of sellers who request incentivized reviews and reviewers who seek incentives forms incentivized review groups. In this paper, we focus on the incentivized review groups in e-commerce platforms. We perform the data collections from various social networking platforms, including Facebook, WeChat, and Douban. A measurement study of incentivized review groups is conducted with regards to group members, group activities, and products. To identify the incentivized review groups, we propose a new detection approach based on co-review graphs. Specifically, we employ the community detection method to find the suspicious communities from co-review graphs. We also build a “gold standard” dataset from the data we collected, which contains the information of reviewers who belong to incentivized review groups. We utilize the “gold standard” dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of our detection approach.