If you’re a business owner with an online presence on Facebook or Instagram, or both, then this concerns you.
Meta, the company that owns both platforms, says it is updating its Community Feedback Policy which will start to affect businesses in the United States. The aim, as mentioned in the announcement, “is to clearly share what we allow and prohibit within customer feedback.”
Going forward, Facebook will make sure customers post reviews on the pages of businesses that are based on “real purchasing experiences”, while trying to keep irrelevant, fraudulent and offensive feedback off of its platforms.
Meta claims there are over 200 million businesses who use the company’s products (apps, messaging services, etc.) to connect with their customers. It, therefore, makes sense to keep things in order by implementing more specific regulations on what is and isn’t allowed in product and business reviews, including clear rules against incentivisation and parameters around relevance.
It isn’t that Facebook hasn’t been tackling users who leave fake or potentially abusive reviews. The new policy is the company’s approach to make sure the rules of engagement are in written form incase of abusers.
There are cases where people will write fake or bad reviews about a business as a way to get refunds or other freebies. And so, Facebook’s new policy is supposed to manage such these kinds of offensive behaviours.
It will also take care the “overly positive (and usually very vague) reviews” which some businesses pay random users to leave on their pages. As vice versa, this might also affect companies who compensate users to change a bad review they’ve written.
In essence, if you’re a business owner on Facebook and you give out freebies in exchange for reviews Meta can decide to take down your page, if there’s no clear business transaction between both parties compared to what’s on the Page.
Online reviews have suddenly become a platform where angered consumers rear outbursts whether or not their feedback is justified. At the same time, the value of positive reviews, amid the rise of online shopping and discovery, has also increased significantly, providing more motivation for businesses to elicit positive feedback however they can.
As to how Meta will know which review is wrong or legit, the company says that it will rely on automated technology and human reviewers to detect potential violations. In addition it is encouraging people and businesses to report questionable reviews in its apps.
