According to this article, it seems that forums and blogs, a platform where people often use to share their true thoughts and opinions, are being “polluted” by companies through a marketing technique known as stealth marketing. An example in the article is about rigged reviews from Tabelog, Japan’s largest restaurant review service. As stated in the report:

…Tabelog’s reviews have been manipulated by third-party agents who receive payment from restaurants who want better ratings, or even to give rival restaurants bad ratings.

Similar incidents also happened in one of Taiwan’s most visited forum Mobile01, which is most well known for it’s electronic products section. Some of the writers were called out for posting products reviews that are biased towards Samsung. When comparing the camera function on Samsung’s S3 and HTC’s One X, the reviewer chose to take pictures using the S3 on a bright sunny day while using One X on a cloudy day, then continue on to claim that S3 is much better than One X. Not only so, writers also photoshopped pictures so that the screen on Note 2 looks better than it actually is. The forum’s obvious favoritism towards Samsung has also led netizens to come up with a satirical name for the site: Samobile01.    *click on image to enlarge

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I find this type of marketing unethical because people usually go to forums or blogs for reviews because they want to hear about the product from people that are not affiliated with the company. However, users are actually still being tricked and manipulated by the company’s stealth marketing technique. What is worse is that some companies not only have writers write biased reviews that promotes their products, but also at the same time degrades products from other companies.