Solution

The government announced guidelines for electronic commerce platforms to fight the hazards of fake reviews and ratings through automated and manual moderation that would filter out biases, fraudulent posts, and foul language, and also verify the authenticity of the reviewers. These guidelines are for a range of e-commerce platforms dealing in consumer goods, food delivery, and travel. The framework has been formulated by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) with the help of a committee that included at least 11 e-commerce companies: Zomato, Swiggy, Reliance Retail, Tata Sons, Amazon, Flipkart, Blinkit, Google, Meta, Meesho and Zepto. These companies have committed to adhere to the standards. The reviewers’ identities are to be verified through email, telephone call, or SMS. The e-commerce companies will have to inform the department about the methodology to calculate overall ratings. They will ensure reviews are not edited before publication and display the date of submission of the reviews. The overall ratings are to be included in the default display, showing the average of all reviews.