Hey all,

Does anyone have any ideas on what could be used as a way to filter untrustworthy user submitted content?

Take Yelp for instance, they would need to prevent competitors writing business reviews on their competitors. They would need to prevent business owners favourably reviewing their own business, or forcing friends/family to do so. They would need to prevent poor quality reviews from affecting a businesses rating and so on.

I can't think what they might use to do this:

• Prevent multiple users from the same IP reviewing certain things
• Prevent business owners reviewing their own business (maybe even other businesses in the same categories as their own?)
• Somehow determine what a review is about and what the actual intentions behind it are

Other than the first and second points, I can't think of any clever/easy way to filter potentially harmful reviews from being made available, other than a human doing it. Obviously for a site the size of Yelp this wouldn't be feasible, so what parameters could they take into consideration? Even with human intervention, how would anyone know it was the owners best buddy writing a fake review without knowing the people?

I'm using this as an example in a larger study on the subject of filtering user content automatically. Does anyone have any ideas how these systems may work and what they take into consideration?

Thanks!