> According to Amazon, the company already has the necessary tools to identify and stop fake reviews, suggesting that third-party services that claim to do this “are mostly wrong.”
I am certainly willing to believe that Amazon has all the necessary tools, but it's very clear that they don't care to use them.
Incidentally, I had also been in contact with Facebook about a role "combatting abuse" across their services. That loop was a bait and switch for standard ML (eg, improve video recommendations for users to keep their eyeballs on FB).
I try to assume good intentions, but I'm constantly given evidence that there are no good intentions in these companies. I don't think Amazon really has any reason to combat fake reviews. And I know a good number of engineers and scientists there. It's a tractable problem.
People are catching on to the low quality of the reviews on amazon and once that credibility is gone, its never coming back.
Their supply chain is a pretty strong moat but its not insurmountable.
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Also, If its not profit, there must be some 'perverse incentive' at some level of the company to act as they do.
So what if Amazon can or even does do it? There should be multiple apps offering the same service available to Apple customers. This doesn't make sense.