Lulzfags v. moralfags

It is almost a century since the Michelin brothers had the brainwave of supplementing their motorists’ guide with information about fine-dining establishments. Their star-rating system had become a mainstay of lifestyle reviews long before the Internet came along. In the digital age, this work has been comprehensively crowd-sourced: the immense success of review sites such as Yelp and Amazon has been built on the voluntary input of users. In theory, it should have been a consumer rights utopia. But product reviews are big business — and where there is lucre, there are shenanigans.

‘Astroturfing’ — the posting of fake reviews by competitors or business owners — is just one of a number of nefarious practices catalogued by Joseph Reagle in Reading the Comments. In recent years California-based Yelp has found itself the subject of several lawsuits, and a Federal Trade Commission investigation, following allegations that the site used the threat of unfavourable coverage to extort advertising revenues from hundreds of small businesses.