Alibaba attempts to oust malicious online reviewers from Taobao

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Alibaba attempts to oust malicious online reviewers from Taobao

Staff Reporter
2015-08-01

Taobao's headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, July 2013. (File photo/CFP)

Alibaba, China's leading internet firm, has launched a campaign against malicious online reviewers who blackmail online vendors with the threat of spoiling their reputation.

Alibaba reported that it has found 150,000 instances of malicious online reviews every week over recent months and believes that it has identified 5 million IDs as involved in blackmail scams. The company stated that it will erase all criticism posted by those IDs, according to the Beijing Daily.

Over the past several years, harassment by these kind of scams has been a major headache for many vendors on Taobaco, an e-commerce website under the auspices of Alibaba. "I had to pay one reviewer several hundreds of yuan before he stopped posting critical remarks on my products," reported Zhuang Zhuang, a small vendor on Taobao.

A cafe owner in Beijing even paid 30,000 yuan (US$4,831) to a malicious reviewer before the latter stopped flooding the website with negative remarks on the cafe.

To cut down on malicious reviews, Alibaba rolled out a model for gauging the integrity of consumers, capable of distinguishing normal critics from malicious critics, while offering vendors a digital tool to remove malicious criticisms. Backed by big-data technology, the model is capable of labeling professional malicious critics as pariahs on the internet, in addition to making it impossible for the critics to continue their attacks under a new ID.