Content
Integrity Policy
Our Approach to
Content Integrity
Sportoso, has created a community where members can review and
comment sport events, sport facilities, sport shops or sport equipment and read
other member’s reviews. Once in a while, someone will try to game our system by
attempting to post a fake review, so we thought it would be helpful to share
our approach, our policies, and the actions we take to identify, block, and
remove fraudulent reviews. Here's what we believe.
We
believe the best sport advice comes from other sportsmen.
Sportoso members can submit reviews
of their experiences at sport events, sport center, sport shop or sport equipment,
from all over the world.
We
believe in "the right to write."
Sportoso community has a wealth of valuable experience, and every
one of our users should feel confident sharing their opinions. When you attend
an event, access a sport facility, buy a sport equipment in a shop or you try a
new equipment, you have a fundamental right to talk about that experience with
others. We are immensely proud of the community we’ve built which helps
customers do just that.
We believe every experience counts.
If there is a group participating in a sporting event, train in a sports
center, buy in a sport shop or try out new sport equipment we believe that
all of them should have a voice. That's what Sportoso stands for.
Because we believe in promoting personal experiences, we do not
take lightly the decision to remove a review from our site. It might be easier
to give in to censorship and remove reviews that a business owner disagrees
with. But it goes against what we stand for, which is the right for genuine
consumers to share their experiences.
In keeping with this philosophy, while we do require reviewers to
certify that they are reviewing their own experiences before they can submit
their review to Sportoso, we don’t seek third-party verification.
We believe that everyone should play by the
same rules. Businesses are not able to influence Sportoso to improve their
reviews or ratings.
We
have unique processes for moderating the content submitted to TripAdvisor, as
well as proprietary algorithms that calculate a business' daily rank within our
Traveller Ranking. Those processes and algorithms are applied in the same way to all content, complaints and properties. We
never have and never will give our advertisers or anyone else preferential
treatment.
We have unique processes for moderating the content submitted to
Sportoso. The order in which the reviews appear is chronological and is applied
in the same way to all contents.
We
believe that businesses who don't play by the rules should be penalized.
Businesses know that consumers rely
heavily on reviews when making decisions on their sport plans/activities. Unfortunately,
it may happen that some unscrupulous businesses will try to improve their
ratings to attract more consumers, positively reviewing their own structure
(including engaging other people willing to do it for them) or negatively
reviewing their competitors
These activities constitute fraud. Posting fake reviews violates
the Sportoso Terms of Use, as well as unfair competition and/or consumer
protection laws in many countries. We invest massive amounts of time, effort
and money into identifying and blocking fraudulent activity on our site.
How
Sportoso identifies and blocks fraud
- We have experience
identifying what normal reviews and reviewing behaviour tend to look like
on our platform. We're experts at spotting patterns of fraudulent
activity.
- We run reviews to
identify moderation or integrity issues prior to publication. This process
allows Sportoso to analyse and categorise massive amounts of data quickly
and thoroughly.
- We have a staff
working to manage content and to identify, block and remove fraud.
- Once reviews are
published, we allow business owners and community members to flag content
for our review if they believe it is fraudulent. All reports from our
community and owners are reviewed and analyzed by our team of
content specialists.
- We proactively
engage with companies trying to hire people to write reviews as well as
property owners attempting to buy fake reviews in order to catch those
that try to circumvent our systems.
How
Sportoso penalises businesses found to engage in fraudulent activity
- We block or remove
the fake reviews.
- We aggressively
pursue companies that offer to boost a business' reputation by writing
fake reviews on its behalf. When we catch them, we remove all of the
fake reviews they've posted, and we penalise their clients.
You
may be surprised that Sportoso doesn’t simply remove the listing on our site
for a business caught engaging in review fraud. In fact, that's exactly what
some of these businesses want us to do, so they can prevent consumers from
researching and commenting on them. But we believe consumers have the right to
know what other Sportoso users are saying.
Finally, we believe
it's important for our community to be informed.