Hosting a website in the UK carries a lot of liability for the actions of your users. What would this mean for e.g. a consumer reviews forum someone is hosting as a hobby? Or a forum about any hobby, that includes discussions and reviews about the products used by that hobby, e.g. bicycle reviews on a cycling forum?

The web is becoming professionalised: if you want to publish user-generated content on the web, you will need to moderate all of that content. The Internet is going the same way as radio: for most people, you'll be tuning in to regulated, commercial services. For enthusiasts, there will be a separate space where you can do whatever you want, but you can't offer laissez-faire services on behalf of the great unwashed. It's a great loss of theoretical freedom, but it'll have no impact on anyone's real life.

Given that the internet has almost completely supplanted the public square, I wouldn't say that putting it all under corporate control ("regulated, commercial services") would have no impact on real life.

The public square has always been controlled by private interests. Before the internet, public discourse occurred in newspapers and magazines. Coffeehouses and pubs were always privately-owned, and their proprietors and clientele-at-large determine what conduct and conversation is acceptable within.

Free speech absolutism isn't a real thing, you know: everyone has a set of ideas that they're not willing to listen to.

Coffeehouses and pubs weren't remotely as consolidated as social or traditional media, nor did they have as much power to regulate the speech of its patrons - not everything the patrons said was overheard or written down by the owner.

The nature of public discourse contained in newspapers and magazines hasn't changed. What has changed is that more and more of person-to-person communication is mediated.

> everyone has a set of ideas that they're not willing to listen to.

Yes. But are they choosing what they will listen to, or are they forced by law to have that choice made for them by a government-approved corporation?

Proving reviews are fake is hard indeed. A few years back I fell for fake reviews. I was booking a trip and saw a fairly new "boutique hotel" with good reviews (on booking.com). Once we arrived, it was nothing of the sort. The hotel was grimy, the room was small, things were broken etc etc.

Once home I looked at the reviews again and I noticed a pattern: each review had only a few sentences and, in hindsight, odd language. For example, it was praising the management in quite a few of them. I don't know about you, but I've never considered the quality of "the management" of a hotel, let alone that I would be inclined to write about it in a review.

I'm sure they paid a shady company to post those reviews in order to boost their rating. I complained to booking.com, but of course they never did anything with it. I imagine it is hard for a platform to do, but I'm also sure they can do more than they do now.

It's never going to be perfect, because then you get into the arguments about exactly what a "fake" review is. But it could be better.

Because as you say, it's pretty common for companies to just go out and buy reviews. You see it all the time on places like Amazon - where a new product suddenly has hundreds of 5* reviews, all saying similar things, from accounts that just go round giving 5* reviews to all kinds of products. It's blatantly obvious to anyone who ever takes a cursory look at the reviews, let along to the company who has all the backend and analytical data about them.

Hopefully this means that companies are required to start doing something about that, or at the very least to respond to complaints like yours rather than just ignoring them.

To fine a business for fake reviews, the state must prove there are a lot of unaddressed fake reviews, which is very hard to demonstrate.

With AI, it will be almost impossible to do unless you enforce some kind of generalized ID check.