Knowledge
The Omnibus Directive and consumer reviews
The Omnibus Directive is EU legislation, in force in Poland since January 2023, obliging sellers to verify reviews and prohibiting their manipulation.
Where it comes from
A business publishing reviews on its own site must state whether and how it checks that they come from people who actually used the product or service. Prohibited are not only creating and buying fake reviews but also distorting them — including deleting negative ones and selectively soliciting positive ones.
What it means in practice
In Poland the maximum penalty for infringing collective consumer interests reaches 10% of the previous year's turnover, and other member states apply comparable regimes. In practice the line runs here: reporting reviews that breach platform policy is allowed; systematically pruning negatives is not — and it shows from outside, in a rating distribution with not one single star across a thousand reviews.