How „experts” and fake reviews manipulate the Polish internet.

In today’s world, building an expert image sometimes boils down to marketing rather than necessarily proper competence. Piotr Zarzycki, in his lecture at CONFidence 2026, shows how easily prestigious titles can be acquired and how medical platforms, despite verification claims, still struggle with a plague of fake reviews.

The path to becoming a „specialist” according to some portals is very easy. Let’s look at the „40 under 40 in cybersecurity” competition. It turned out that to get on the cover of the magazine hosting this competition, it was enough to simply send one article and two photos. The lack of reliable competence verification shows that many such honors are the result of building artificial prestige meant to instill trust in audiences.

The problem with fake reviews is that we are dependent on them. As many as 99.5% of people are influenced by reviews before a purchase, and 91% believe these reviews. The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) imposes fines on portals that create fake reviews, such as Opinie.pro, yet this practice continues to evolve under changed names.

Is ZnanyLekarz a reliable database of specialists?

The main focus of Piotr Zarzycki’s lecture is the portal ZnanyLekarz.pl, which serves about 300,000 doctors and over 20 million visits. He was intrigued by the fact that in 2023, reviews were described as „100% verified,” whereas now they are moderated according to their own rules. To check how reliable these reviews are, the author scraped data using virtual machines and VPNs, bypassing security measures such as Cloudflare.

The results he obtained were interesting:

• He identified thousands of identical reviews. A comment about a „wonderful doctor” appeared nearly 200 times on the profiles of different specialists.
• He discovered that some reviews have „production errors,” meaning a review about a urologist was copied onto a gynecologist’s profile, while the names of other doctors remained in the text.

How to become a dietitian over a weekend?

Zarzycki tried to get onto the portal as a doctor, so he bought a dietitian course for over 2,000 PLN, completed it, and received a certificate confirming his qualifications. The paradox of moderation was that after Piotr created his account, the system deleted test reviews posted by his friends, while simultaneously leaving thousands of other duplicated reviews.

Let’s ask the question: how to defend oneself against manipulations?

For this purpose, a special tool was created – znanyściemniacz.pl, which allows users to verify the reliability of published reviews independently. The whole process involves automatically searching for reviews that are identical or very similar to those posted on others’ profiles. Zarzycki emphasizes that currently in the Polish internet, marketing and a clinic’s desire to promote a young doctor significantly outweigh reliability.

The entire lecture, along with the details of the investigation presented, can be watched on the YouTube channel, and more such current topics will appear at CONFidence 2027 – registration is now open!