Wait until you hear about how some people get given free products to review them. Amazon has no incentive to police their reviews, because they just want volume.
Amazon, the company, has plenty of incentive to police their reviews. Fake reviews deteriorate customer trust and drive customers away in the long run.
The problem is there are two parties who have large incentives to create fake reviews: 1) Merchants 2) Executives whose compensation is tied to short-term results .
Right now these two parties with adverse incentives seem to be winning the battle, but it wouldn't surprise me if this changed in the near future.
Yelp's battle against fake reviews and Google's battle against SEO spam both come to mind as examples where the company was largely able to get things under control and aligned with their best interests. There will always be an escalating cat and mouse game between the "company's police" and the "fakers", but Yelp and Google seem to stay one step ahead while Amazon is one step behind.
When there's no equivalent alternative, this inverts. This is why it the tweet changes nothing.
https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/amazon-bans-most...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32251698
I bet there is more they could be doing, but you can probably never totally solve the problem.
This has been the norm in many industries back when Amazon was still selling books (and reviewers would also get them from the publisher).
It's commonplace for book publishers going back to at least the 1960's. I know this because my dad had many review copies of books.
I think disclouser is actually US law so if you are involved in these scams you might find yourself in legal trouble...