Recently, there's an article at Vice.com, where the author decided to play a hoax on TripAdvisor... They created a FAKE restaurant, which is a picnic table in the back of the author's house, created some FAKE entrees (you'll laugh at the ingredients), got some FAKE reviews through burner phones and whatnot, and got it to be the top-rated restaurant in London... a restaurant that does NOT exist.
I won't spoil the method, let's just say, it's easier than you think.
This wasn't the first prank the author, Oobah Butler, had done. Previously he bullsh*tted his way onto Paris Fashion Week and it was absolutely brilliant. But he's hardly the first to prank experts and succeded.
But then, expert reviews are fooled all the time. In 2008, wine critic and author Robin Goldstein created a fake restaurant, allegedly stocked with the worst wines Wine Spectator magazine had ever rated. The submitted it to the said magazine. After a while, the fake restaurant had won "award of excellence" by the same magazine.
Wine Spectator called it "publicity seeking stunt", but it exposes something deeply troubling... What sort of experts at the magazine review the candidate for "award of excellence"? And if they let a fake restaurant get on, what can DELIBERATE manipulation do?
But the pattern ran much much deeper than that. Experts are fooled ALL THE TIME.
- TV host displayed a $15 IKEA print in an art museum, and none of the art experts spotted the problem.
- The Wine Spectator gag had a sequel... a French scientist decided to die a white wine red and gave it to 54 wine science students. NONE could detect they are tasting a white wine.
- Food experts cannot tell McDonalds chicken McNuggets from "organic" chicken nuggets. In fact, people cannot tell organic fruit from non-organic fruit
