The Guardian: How TripAdvisor changed travel

Advertisement As the so-called “reputation economy” has grown, so too has a shadow industry of fake reviews, which can be bought, sold and traded online. For TripAdvisor, this trend amounts to an existential threat. Its business depends on having real consumers post real reviews. Without that, says Dina Mayzlin, a professor of marketing at the University of Southern California, “the whole thing falls apart”. And there have been moments, over the past several years, when it looked like things were falling apart. One of the most dangerous things about the rise of fake reviews is that they have also endangered genuine ones – as companies like TripAdvisor raced to eliminate fraudulent posts from their sites, they ended up taking down some truthful ones, too. And given that user reviews can go beyond complaints about bad service and peeling wallpaper, to much more serious claims about fraud, theft and sexual assault, their removal becomes a grave problem. [...]

Soon, Kaufer noticed that users were gravitating away from expert opinion and towards the crowdsourced reviews, so he abandoned his original concept and began focusing exclusively on collecting original consumer input. He hoped that selling ads on the site would be enough to keep the company afloat, but when it became clear that this wasn’t bringing in enough money, his team shifted to a new model. From late 2001, every time a visitor clicked on a link to a given hotel or restaurant, TripAdvisor would charge the business a small fee for the referral. Within three months, the company was making $70,000 a month, and in March 2002, it broke even. “I think they call it a pivot now,” Kaufer said in 2014. “I called it running for my life back then.”[...]

TripAdvisor’s in-house forensic analysts use fraud-detection software – the same kinds used to detect credit card fraud – to flag suspicious patterns. But given the sheer amount of reviews on TripAdvisor and the increasing sophistication of the fakes, there is no hope of identifying and removing them all. Last year, Vice writer Oobah Butler managed to get his shed listed as the #1 restaurant in London by soliciting fake reviews from family and friends and posting images of gourmet-looking dishes made from shaving cream and bleach. Before joining Vice, Butler wrote fake TripAdvisor reviews for restaurants, £10 per entry; “this convinced me that TripAdvisor was a false reality,” he wrote of the experience. For Young, the tendency of businesses to rush to litigation in order to protect their reputations is symptomatic of “an iceberg problem”. As he explained: “TripAdvisor can see the 10% that is sticking out of the water. [But] there is 90% or some unknown percent that is very dangerous and problematic that it is not visible to us.”[...]

From 2015 to 2017, TripAdvisor users removed more than 2,000 reviews from the site as a result of harassment by business owners, according to Kevin Carter, TripAdvisor’s associate director of corporate communications. Businesses have also developed more subtle tactics designed to stop critical reviews from appearing in the first place. In July, Australia’s largest property developer was fined $3million for suppressing negative reviews of its rental apartments by withholding the email addresses of disgruntled guests from TripAdvisor, ensuring that the company could not prompt them to write a review. In an infamous case a few years ago, a boutique guesthouse in Hudson, New York added a provision, in the fine print of its contract with guests, stating that a single negative review posted online would result in a fine of $500. In this case, the hotel’s strategy backfired. After the policy was mocked in the pages of the New York Post, the hotel received more than 3,000 negative reviews on its Yelp and Facebook pages. Soon afterwards, it shut down.

read the article or listen to the podcast

VICE: This Town Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Non-Christians Owning Houses

For over a century the “Chautauqua on Lake Michigan,” perched on a hillside overlooking a particularly scenic expanse of coastline, has served as a local cultural center and sacred retreat for families like Sheaffer’s, who mostly have been visiting for generations. But for the past decade idyllic, serene Bay View has been embroiled in a bitter internal conflict that’s sharply divided the tight-knit community and—because of its echoes of the ugly housing discrimination fights of past decades—resonated far beyond, tapping a nerve in the country’s culture wars and the broader debate about the role of religion in American life. The core of this dispute is that while anyone is welcome to visit Bay View or participate in its events—and many outsiders do—for decades only Christians have been allowed to actually own cottages and act as voting community members. In early August, after years of escalating tension, members voted to finally amend the bylaws to allow non-Christians to own property, but the dispute remains ongoing. A group of plaintiffs, arguing the new provisions still amount to religious discrimination, are forging ahead with a federal lawsuit against the Bay View Association.[...]

Bay View was clearly established as a Protestant retreat. Members opposed to changing the requirements point to its mission statement outlining the centrality of Christian values, and to historical documents that suggest the founders’ religious intent. “We did not enter this wilderness to make money, nor build a city of pleasure,” one 1900 brochure reads. “We came to worship God, to establish a center of Christian influence.”[...]

At the time he joined, Duquette liked Bay View’s Christian association, he said, but he didn’t give the membership requirements much thought until the mid-00s, when the dispute started catching fire. One member, poking around in the archives, discovered that Bay View’s explicit Christian-only requirement didn’t originate with its founding but was actually added around 1942, when the board adopted a resolution that members must be “of the white race and a Christian.” (By 1959 Bay View had dropped the race requirement; from the 1960s to 1980s it implemented a 10 percent quota on Catholics. Bylaws later changed “Christian” to “Christian persuasion.”) [...]

This summer’s vote was billed as a kind of compromise that would finally end the dispute. The “Christian persuasion” and minister-letter requirements would be removed, although a new amendment would require prospective members to agree to “respect the principles of the United Methodist Church” and support Bay View’s Christian mission. It would also add a requirement that a majority of the nine-person board is Methodist.

read the article

The Atlantic: Trumpism Is ‘Identity Politics’ for White People

That explanation ignored the uncomfortable fact that Trump’s economic vision was centered on a politics of white identity, charging that immigrants and unqualified minorities were obtaining advantages the average white American could not claim. That left his opponents with a choice: Contest that vision, or let him attack those groups uncontested. In the meantime, Trump’s administration has seen that economic message almost entirely subsumed by the focus of congressional Republicans on tax cuts for the wealthy and plans to shrink the social safety net. But even as the message has shifted, there hasn’t been a corresponding erosion in Trump’s support. The economics were never the point. The cruelty was the point.

Nevertheless, among those who claim to oppose identity politics, the term is applied exclusively to efforts by historically marginalized constituencies to claim rights others already possess. Trump’s campaign, with its emphasis on state violence against religious and ethnic minorities—Muslim bans, mass deportations, “nationwide stop-and-frisk”—does not count under this definition, but left-wing opposition to discriminatory state violence does. (A November panel at the right-wing Heritage Foundation on the threat posed by “identity politics,” with no apparent irony, will feature an all-white panel. )

But the entire closing argument of the Republican Party in the 2018 midterm elections is a naked appeal to identity politics—a politics based in appeals to the loathing of, or membership in, a particular group. The GOP’s plan to slash the welfare state in order to make room for more high-income tax cuts is unpopular among the public at large. In order to preserve their congressional majority, Republicans have taken to misleading voters by insisting that they oppose cuts or changes to popular social insurance programs, while stoking fears about Latino immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and black criminality. In truth, without that deception, identity politics is all the Trump-era Republican Party has.

read the article

openDemocracy : Debates about poppies are nothing new, but the tone has changed in Brexit Britain

For others, it’s a moved from a quiet sign of Remembrance to an icon of Brexit nationalism. The author Matt Haig tweeted “I'm not wearing a poppy this year. I think it is shifting from a symbol remembering war's horror, to a symbol of war-hungry nationalism.”[...]

When the government had organised a number of victory parades, some of the soldiers refused to participate. When they instead held the first, more sombre Armistice Day, in 1919, a number of the veterans protested against the conditions they were expected to live in.[...]

Similarly, the poppy hasn’t just recently become a nationalist symbol. It always has been. Until last summer, there was a famous memorial on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey, to the Anzac soldiers who fought against the Ottoman empire there. Supposedly quoting Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, it reads, “There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours”.

The contrast with the British legion’s statement, under the banner “what we remember” on their website: “The Legion advocates a specific type of Remembrance connected to the British Armed Forces, those who were killed, those who fought with them and alongside them.”

read the article

Foreign Policy: Germany’s New Politics of Cultural Despair

If the 1990s marked a high point for the New Right, the meaning of all this attention was debated; it became the stuff of op-eds and academic argument. One commentator, the Swedish sociologist Goran Dahl, saw the development as a revival of Weimar Germany’s conservative revolution—that broad movement of proto-fascist writers, academics, and activists who supplied an aura of respectability to the ultranationalist politics that culminated in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich (a cause in which some, though not all, of those right-wing radicals would eventually enlist).[...]

One key to the New Right’s success, as Dahl predicted, has been its effort to capture a hip style of political engagement usually associated with the left. Starting in the late 1970s, the New Right appropriated environmentalism, anti-imperialism, and the sort of active citizenship for which the Greens became best known. Like the leftist counterculture that emerged from the 1968 student protests throughout Europe, the New Right is adept at styling itself as an “alternative milieu.” This is partly due to its origins in the same anti-establishment zeitgeist as the New Left, but it is also partly a self-conscious co-option of leftist notions, another way in which members of the New Right, as Weiss puts it, “seem to have learned from the left and offer themselves as ‘new ’68ers.’” [...]

As he shows, radical conservatism can accommodate a host of causes and enemies, with salvation of the West from a tide of Muslim immigrants the current favorites. But for today’s New Right, like the illiberal German right of earlier generations, the absolute enemy is always liberal modernity and the forces of universalism, which are seen as a threat to traditional identities and communities and the comforting authority they provide. [...]

Islamic fundamentalism, Weiss argues, is also an authoritarian revolt against the materialism and rootlessness supposedly spawned by liberal globalization. Ironically, Europe’s identitarians are ideologically closest not to their cosmopolitan fellow nationals but to the most pious among the Muslim immigrants who insist on holding onto their culture and religious identity.

read the article

RSA: The Truth About Algorithms | Cathy O'Neil

We live in the age of the algorithm - mathematical models are sorting our job applications, curating our online worlds, influencing our elections, and even deciding whether or not we should go to prison. But how much do we really know about them? Former Wall St quant, Cathy O'Neil, exposes the reality behind the AI, and explains how algorithms are just as prone to bias and discrimination as the humans who program them.  

Wired: Estonia may actually have a use for the blockchain: green energy

The company began to use blockchain to link business buyers of energy – companies that buy electricity – directly with the producer, after striking a deal with Elering, one of Estonia‘s independent electricity and gas system operators. The idea was to use energy ‘tokenisation’ – by linking energy consumption and production data to the blockchain, in an attempt to digitise the country’s energy sector. Now the pilot project is yielding its first results.[...]

The bulk of energy in the Baltic country is produced by fossil fuels – only 18 per cent come from renewables. The main aim is to test the limits of what’s possible with blockchain technology, says WePower’s CEO Nick Martyniuk. At the same time it is trying to increase the percentage of eletricity generated from renewables. “Even though the cost of renewables has dropped significantly, small to medium size companies don't have a good way to start buying green energy.[...]

It's not clear, though, that scaling up will actually work, as it would mean using blockchain technology for data that is flowing at high speed and in huge volume. One concern is transaction capacity: WePower mainly uses the public ethereum blockchain that applies the so-called proof-of-work (PoW) approach that requires a lot of energy and computing power that only professional ethereum miners can provide (although ethereum may at some point switch to the environmentally-friendlier and easier “proof-of-stake” approach). So PoW means the transaction capacity might be limited, says Fei Wang, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, energy research and consultancy firm. “This may not be an issue during the pilot phase, but this would be a hurdle if the project were to expand to a full commercial deployment.”

read the article

Bloomberg: Poland’s Populists Are Suddenly Vulnerable

The party won a resounding victory when compared with local elections in 2014, based on the results tallied by Oct. 24. It took regions it didn’t control before. But it was clear the share of the vote was down from 2015, when the numbers swept it to power with a record parliamentary majority. Questions are being asked why it couldn’t build on that success. “People realized that Law and Justice isn’t immortal,” says Joanna Mucha, a lawmaker for the opposition Civic Platform group.

Until now, nothing seemed to faze the leadership. A protracted impasse with the EU over a power grab of the independent judiciary and public media and a confrontation with the U.S. and Israel over a law making it a criminal offense to suggest Poland played any role in the Holocaust were met with kudos among supporters. They bought into the narrative of a plucky government standing up for their nation against what the party calls “anti-Polonism.” In April, as relations with allies deteriorated, Law and Justice still commanded an average lead in the polls that was wider than its sweeping victory in 2015. It helped that the economy was—and still is—growing at a healthy clip. That’s because Poland is the biggest net recipient of EU aid, and consumers are enjoying Law and Justice’s increased spending on social welfare such as subsidies for families.[...]

“It’s a clear verdict that the populist revolution is getting weaker,” says Marcin Zaborowski, senior associate at Visegrad Insight, a journal of analysis and opinion focusing on central Europe. “It’s also a personal defeat for Morawiecki, who has been a better, modern face of the party, geared to more centrist voters, and this bid has failed. The result will weaken the position of Morawiecki within the party.”

read the article

Reuters: Steve Bannon drafting curriculum for right-wing Catholic institute in Italy (SEPTEMBER 14, 2018)

Benjamin Harnwell, director of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute based in a mountaintop monastery not far from Rome, told Reuters Bannon had been helping to build up the institute for about half of its eight-year life.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading Vatican conservative who is president of the Institute’s board of advisers, said Bannon would be playing a leading role there.[...]

Bannon’s increased engagement with the Institute demonstrates how his involvement in Europe extends beyond electoral politics to an effort to build a populist faction inside the Catholic Church.[...]

Harnwell said he founded the institute while working as an aide to a British Conservative European Parliament member. At the time, one of the legislature’s committees was trying to block Rocco Buttiglione, a confidant of Pope John Paul II, from becoming European Commissioner for justice and security.

During a confirmation hearing, Buttiglione, who was nominated to the European Commission by then-Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, described homosexuality as a sin and said the principal role of women was to have children. Amid political uproar, Buttiglione withdrew from consideration for the Commission.

read the article