Lulzfags v. moralfags

It is almost a century since the Michelin brothers had the brainwave of supplementing their motorists’ guide with information about fine-dining establishments. Their star-rating system had become a mainstay of lifestyle reviews long before the Internet came along. In the digital age, this work has been comprehensively crowd-sourced: the immense success of review sites such as Yelp and Amazon has been built on the voluntary input of users. In theory, it should have been a consumer rights utopia. But product reviews are big business — and where there is lucre, there are shenanigans.

‘Astroturfing’ — the posting of fake reviews by competitors or business owners — is just one of a number of nefarious practices catalogued by Joseph Reagle in Reading the Comments. In recent years California-based Yelp has found itself the subject of several lawsuits, and a Federal Trade Commission investigation, following allegations that the site used the threat of unfavourable coverage to extort advertising revenues from hundreds of small businesses.

The nexus of publishing and advertising is, of course, perennially fraught. Witness the recent goings-on at the Daily Telegraph, whose chief political commentator resigned in February claiming the paper had compromised its coverage of the HSBC scandal for commercial reasons. Online comment manipulation is no different: strip away the algorithmic complexity and it’s the age-old story of people and businesses scrabbling for attention and influence.

Reading the Comments is not, however, a treatise on digital-era business ethics. As Reagle astutely observes, there is much more to online comment than just rating books and restaurants. Even the simple act of ‘liking’ a Facebook status — or an Instagram picture, or a Tumblr post — is a form of online comment. Regular users of social media are locked in a perpetual loop of appraisal and validation; and a growing body of research suggests this is having a detrimental impact on self-esteem and emotional wellbeing.