IV. CUSTOMER REVIEWS PUBLISHED ON TELEMATICS SYSTEMS Frequently, customers select a restaurant with the help of reviews that appear on computer systems operated by private companies. The best known is a United States organization, Tripadvisor. Its objective is to publish comments written by customers, registered on the same site, concerning the accommodation facilities they have used and that are present in the database. In Italy, the Competition and Market Authority has had occasion to pronounce on the correctness of the company’s behaviour and has emphasised how it uses advertising messages, so - called claims, capable of “increasing consumer confidence in the authentic and genuine nature of reviews”15. With regard to the structure of the platform, for the Authority it would be easy to register, since the company would not have adequate control systems, for instance “to verify the validity of the e - mail address used to create the account”16. In fact, when a review is published, the Tripadvisor company informs about the policy adopted to counteract untruthful evaluations, but this would not prevent the insertion of comments relating to establishments that are no longer operational, but still have an “open” profile17. The lack of effective supervision of the content led to the detection of the misleading character of some claims, because consumers would not have, “from the first contact, a clear, exhaustive and truthful information picture”18. In particular, the claims and disclaimers would be capable of guiding the conduct of those who rely on the reviews when choosing accommodation facilities. Thus, due to their emphasis and assertiveness, the messages appearing on the site could engender “in an average Internet user”19 the false belief in the reliability of the reviews. The disclaimer, which should reduce the deceptive character of the system, could not fulfil its function, as it is unclear and placed in a section of the site that is difficult to access20. On the basis of the paradigm of the average consumer’s knowledge, it is assessed whether the content of claims alters the overall information picture, with a negative impact on commercial decisions. However, the user is a shrewd interlocutor, with just enough malice to prevent him from trusting the full consistency of the published reviews. However, he 15 See Competition Authority Decision 19 December 2014, no. 25237. 16 See Competition Authority Decision 19 December 2014, no. 25237. 17 See Competition Authority Decision 19 December 2014, no. 25237. 18 See Competition Authority Decision 19 December 2014, no. 25237. 19 See Cons. Stato, sec. VI, 15 July 2019, no. 4976, in Riv. it. dir. tur., 2021, 86 ff.. 20 See Cons. Stato, sec. VI, 15 July 2019, no. 4976, cit.. 26 CHIARA TINCANI
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