Yesterday if you managed to be logged onto social media at the right time, and have certain tech blogs liked, you may have witnessed some accusations that Blackberry had paid off people to spam the comments section of the BBM for Android and iOS to make it appear as though real people were leaving positive reviews.
This news then manages to travel all the way back to Blackberry already. Moreover, they have even been asked the question: Did you do it?
Blackberry is strongly denying the allegations today and have even come out with an official statement on the matter.
“We have been made aware of a number of potentially fake reviews of BBM for Android on Google Play, with ratings anywhere from one to five stars. We have no knowledge of how these reviews were created or populated. We do not approve of or condone such activities. There are also many genuinely great and useful reviews from our new BBM users on Google Play. We would like to encourage our fans and users to continue to provide true assessments of the BBM experience through the proper channels.”
Fake reviews are of course, nothing new in web space and it is no different from the Google Play store either. Granted, some are true, we’ve even been involved as a direct quote on some apps that developers made and we reviewed, but the comments section is a different type of thing to try and police all together.
Google has made special efforts lately to try and reduce the web spam that they are associated with. Now if you log into your YouTube account, you will be asked if you want to use your Google + profile. This is basically Google saying, we would love you to use this to try and keep you more honest, but at the sake of causing a big up-raw, we’ll also leave the option of you remaining anonymous under a false name.