FTC's rule banning fake online reviews goes into effect
abcnews.go.com
abcnews.go.com
edit: it doesn't seem so. You just have use some weasel language:
>The final rule also bars a business from misrepresenting that the reviews on a review portion of its website represent all or most of the reviews submitted when reviews have been suppressed based upon their ratings or negative sentiment.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...
* Step 1, take a product with a terrible rating
* Step 2, create a new SKU for the exact same product so it has no ratings
* Step 3, get a handful of fake 5-star reviews (in some way the FTC isn't going to crack down on)
* Step 4, blast the old terribly reviewed product that now has good reviews on marketing
* Step 5, get 10s of thousands of sales, $$$
* Step 6, let the terrible reviews pour in
Repeat to step 1 (possibly under a different brand name).
Another aspect is review solicitation. eg: ios games often pop up with their own modal of "Rate us" and if you click 5 it redirects you to app store to make a review, if you click 4 or less it redirects you to a feedback form. They grease the path for positive reviewers.
If you really like an app give it a nice review.
Personally, I'd rather see you add a small UI element somewhere, or a banner that appears briefly but critically doesn't cover up any controls. If you absolutely MUST use a pop up, you know when the best time to do that is? After I've completed some in app purchase. If I'm spending money on your product, chances are I'm moderately satisfied with it and feeling pretty good about it at that moment. Or if you don't have in app purchases, unless you've made a "content browsing only" app, you probably have some workflows that have a definite end state. Prompt me then, at the end of me doing what I've come to your app to do. But I've never once given a review / stars to any app that has interrupted me in the middle of or at the start of doing something.
Granted, there are plenty of other places to slot a review link in where it could be just as effective.
I had Napper, a baby sleep tracker, ask me to rate the app at 3 am. Yes, I'm definitely going to give a thorough and well-thought review at 3 am.
The major apps typically exploit selection bias to solicit 5-star reviews. They will wait until the user meets some criteria for "having a good experience" and show an app review prompt at that moment.
Then, having amassed thousands of 5-star reviews, they will turn up the threshold so that only a trickle of the most likely 5-star reviews keep on trickling in to negate any negative organic reviews.
There's a related practice of "pre-prompting" where the app first asks the user whether they are satisfied and only solicits a real app review from those who pass the screening question.
It's all quite shady and makes it hard to trust app reviews. But until the app stores solve this, app developers need to play the game.
This is just a guess, but I’m not sure getting an e-mail asking for a rating a few days after a purchase is really as “get out of my face” inducing as the App pop ups. When I open an app to buy a ticket for public transportation, that is usually while I’m actively boarding the train/bus (because why would I do this in a timely manner?). That is the least likely moment I’ll respond well to review requests. I don’t think I’ve ever been tempted to leave a bad review over one of those emails, but I’m very often tempted to do so by app pop ups. If I’m not the only one then maybe the data would be interesting?
That being said. Unless the 1 star ragers spend time on their review it’s typically rather easy to challenge by the app creator at least in the Apple Store.
Don't just interrupt me randomly before I do the thing I need
Don’t overrule my preferences in the name of growth hacking.
if I could be bothered with the effort, this is the kind of petty I would engage in.
Now if only Apple would enforce those (or stop doing them themselves).
> 4.5.4 ... Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.
The worst offender is DoorDash. If you turn off push ads, after you place an order it will prompt you to turn on notifications "to get the latest on your order". Agreeing turns on ads. You get the prompt even if you already have order update notifications enabled.
I have a strict rule that only people are allowed to make my devices notify; apps get notifications disabled by default.
I haven't lost anything from blocking the rest, and I'm not about to start allowing now.
"Notif" because it's Not a question of If I will allow them, also because it's not worthy of being called by a full and proper name.
They’ve gotten pretty bad about it.
I suspect that some dependency popped it up.
Unfortunately Apple doesn’t seem to care unless the rule is really good for Apple.
How could they allow this?
I sell a product there and some of my competitors are doing those things I listed. Their reviews are also very obviously fake. I’ve also received some obviously fake negative reviews. I’m not really holding out any hope that it’ll get better anytime soon.
I just reduced my Amazon advertising spend so I can focus on other channels. Also a little bit out of spite.
Yes! As a heavy, long-time Amazon user I hate this and have to believe Amazon is knowingly complicit either in continuing to enable this shady vendor behavior or conveniently looking the other way. Of course, shady vendors will game whatever measures Amazon might take to prevent such tricks but it's so prevalent I don't think Amazon seriously invests in detection/prevention of 'rating swapping' on an ongoing basis anymore.
Another super annoying thing Amazon enables is allowing sellers to list multiple different products (SKUs) on the same listing. This was originally intended for things like different colors or sizes of the same product but it is frequently abused by vendors to bundle quite different products into one listing and thus sharing one rating.
Before they were the overwhelming market leader, Amazon used to care about and invest in the accuracy and credibility of product reviews and ratings. About 10 years ago they seemed to stop putting as much effort toward this and certainly in the past five years they don't seem to care if vendors subvert the system. I understand bad behavior can never be 100% prevented but Amazon could police and penalize it far more effectively. For example, requiring sellers above a certain volume of sales and listings to have increasingly stringent "real ID" type verification, making it harder (or at least more costly) to just relist under a new identity when caught cheating.
Surely, 'conspiring to/orchestrating profit through immoral practices' is a more precise statement of Amazon's activities.
The FTC can say it's illegal to do X, and all companies can do X with impunity if the FTC, in practice, does not do anything about it when companies do X.
- Some disgruntled people at company's could leak directly, which would make engaging in this behavior riskier
- Random individuals or competing companies could monitor product reviews and report. For example, show that an Amazon product ID used to be for another product 3 months ago when reviews were written.
I'm optimistic. There are a lot of regulations (including digital regulations) that everyone ends up following even if the government isn't monitoring things themselves. The risk of penalty just needs to be high enough, and hopefully places like Amazon realize the downside/penalty of fake reviews now makes it worth policing.
It obviously won't help your "first impression" review problem but that's not the intent of the law and not sure why the government would be involved in that. A lot of movies don't hold up well on a rewatch, too. If you are that particular about buying something that lasts X years then you can seek out dedicated advice blogs/youtube channels.
Then again, when I was much younger, I had a backpacking can opener that was useful when hiking in places where sometimes buying canned foods made sense. It was about as large as a very large postage stamp, and crazy good for the size and weight. I wouldn't want to use it at home (much), but it was awesome when I had to carry it around.
So, even for can openers, the story can be complicated.
Also, assuming that the primary purpose of an F350 is towing is ... interesting. Lots and lots of them here in rural NM (as much as anyway, anyway), and they are rarely towing anything.
> The final rule addresses reviews and testimonials that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business or its products or services, or that misrepresent the experience of the person giving it.
I guess the FTC will be handing out fines for improper personal experiences now?
So you end up in some new equilibrium. Maybe that equilibrium is better, maybe it's worse, but it's simply not true that it's always better to do something rather than nothing, and pointing out the loopholes in the rules is valid criticism.
Otherwise it should be possible to sort products or even brands/sellers by age and prefer older ones with more reviews.
I'm not sure Amazon does the first though ATM, and it definitely doesn't do the latter.
I get that some products have configurations, like color and size, but often times wildly different products are grouped together.
Fake or False Consumer Reviews, Consumer Testimonials, and Celebrity Testimonials: The final rule addresses reviews and testimonials that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business or its products or services
If you covertly switch the product, then the reviews shown are from people who did not have actual experience with the product.
Wouldn't like to assume but regulatory bodies usually think about these things in advance no ?
They proposed including review hijacking. There's probably a reason why they didn't include it. Or maybe they think the rules they included already cover it.
This is basically the equivalent of saying "How are you going to stop crime X if they commit crime X in a way that let's them get away with X?"
Either they find a way to enforce the rules against step 3, or they fail to do so. We can't know yet.
It doesn't, as long as the US keeps operating on only the letter of the law. It's obvious you're trying to work around a law that might be incomplete. Everyone involves knows they're trying to play around, find a loophole. Everyone knows it _should_ be illegal, but isn't. As long as the US legal system does not punish for blatantly breaking the spirit of the law, you're going to get screwed.
https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/federal-register-no...
Further down the notice cites the scenario: "[...] more than 4,500 merchants that were automatically publishing only 4- or 5-star consumer reviews"
... receiving and displaying consumer reviews
represent most or all the reviews submitted to the website or platform when reviews are being
suppressed (i.e., not displayable) based upon their ratings or their negative sentiment...The FTC continues to do the good, thankless work of making good public policy. I appreciate it.
It seems to me the FTC under Lina Khan. Before that I just don't remember it having so much pro-consumer impact.
And by the by, I get significantly less spam and phone calls than I used to. Vastly fewer and they're all clearly scams now, which makes it easy to ignore.
Semi-quoting n-gate (RIP in peace): "Hackernews take turns incorrecting one another"
I guess they don't know about how people scam Amazon reviews by getting legit people to simply buy the product and leave a five star review and then get reimbursed for their purchase later by the company or the company the company hired to get these people to do this.
(From 2022) Inside the Underground Market for Fake Amazon Reviews
https://www.wired.com/story/fake-amazon-reviews-underground-...
Buying Positive or Negative Reviews: The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative. It clarifies that the conditional nature of the offer of compensation or incentive may be expressly or implicitly conveyed.
Amazon has had this rule in place for a long time and I still get cards in the boxes of the stuff I buy, "Give us a 5 star review and get 30% off your next purchase!"
Clearly Amazon doesn't know about this or isn't generally enforcing it. I'm wondering how the FTC is going to patrol this since Amazon has already had this rule in place for a while and it hasn't dissuaded sellers from changing their habits.
Given that hundreds of people reading this thread have experienced exactly what you’re talking about, I think it’s impossible that Amazon doesn’t know anything about it.
(as pointed out, it is also illegal for AWS to do that)
Not one has ever conditioned it on expressing a certain sentiment, rating, or anything at all.
But I think most people feel strongly enough they should leave a positive review in exchange for money. It doesn't even need to be said.
Honestly - Amazon really needs some serious lawsuits to force it to stop being such a bad actor in the online retail space.
I think Amazon they would say that they are not a bad actor at all and in fact are providing a meaningful service to consumers and are a major driver of the economy and besides it isn't really a problem because AI[1] yadda yadda yadda.
The truth is:
a. fake reviews make them money, and
b. almost no matter how bad fake reviews get on Amazon, people will continue to dump dopamine into their brains by buying shiny baubles that they might never take out of the box. The "joy" is in purchasing these things, not actually using them.
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/how-ai-sp...
And while moderating things like social media at scale has a lot of challenges, moderating product pages does not. There are orders of magnitude less of them, and they don't need to change that often.
Amazon are being a bunch of cheap bastards and skimping on human moderation of product listings - we, as a society, don't need to give them a free pass for trying to make an even more enormous profit. This is only deeply unprofitable to moderate if you have a lot of products listed you're never going to sell any of.
Suddenly we now have a ton of "new" issues cropping up everywhere. Suddenly being last 20-ish years. These aren't "new". They're just difficult to automate with a computer program, and every company is cheapo now and tries to automate everything with a computer program.
This problem doesn't exist at, say, Walmart. Presumably they physically vet products to at least some degree.
Walmart’s online store has some similar problems. But you maybe it $5 to lost a product, $10 to change it, problem solved. Now you can hire real humans.
Abuse problems? Give more weight to squawks by people with a lot of purchases and not a lot of what are found to be bogus gripes.
Just to be clear, Amazon is the bad actor here, assisting worse actors. This problem exists because they don’t want to spend money managing vendors, and it’s not a problem for anyone else. I never go to Walmart and discover that the cereal has been replaced with sawdust because even a huge, cost-obsessed retailer will hold their vendor accountable for that.
If the government started enforcing real penalties, each order would have an easy way to report this, they’d actually accept abuse reports when you get a contact from a vendor buying reviews, and they’d start spending money reviewing products themselves like other retailers do.
If you haven’t heard of it, in addition to traditional inventory there’s an entire profession around “mystery shopping” where businesses pay normal people to use their services and report their experiences. They’re explicitly trying to catch dishonest middle managers and suppliers who might do things like pull expired food from the shelves when it’s time for the annual inventory or make a better meal for someone they recognize as a corporate employee, and it’d be very, very easy for Amazon to check sellers the same way and if they actively solicited abuse reports they’d have an easy prioritization mechanism. It’d cut slightly into their profit margins but I doubt Bezos would even have to reduce the number of spacecraft he buys because I’ve heard so many people mention not buying things on Amazon because they’ve been burned by fraud in the past.
Insurance against the argument that "This person who wrote the review does exist, just not in a flesh body, they're an AI creation." But that might also be an instant-flop argument legally since I'm sure "personhood" has some definition near-future AI can't hope to approach.
Still seems like it leaves in a giant loophole for all of those overly-cheery reviews that start with, "This item was provided to me by the manufacturer in exchange for a fair and honest review!"
I'm pretty sure getting caught for trying to frame a company for buying reviews would bring criminal charges that are more serious than the FTC enforcement action.
edit: after RTFM, page 42, coupons are considered valuable:
> For the reasons explained in this section, the Commission is finalizing the definition of “purchase a consumer review” to mean to provide something of value, such as money, gift certificates, products, services, discounts, coupons, contest entries, or another review, in exchange for a consumer review.
I think that document is specifically about taxes and coupons. It is not intended to define "compensation" for every statue in California and certainly not for federally issued rules from the FTC.
Even then, that rule is about whether the coupon issuer is compensated when a coupon is used, NOT about if a customer is compensated if they are given a coupon.
> The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...
SnazzyLabs is a good example - he should be well within the criteria for Apple to be sending him iPhones and Macs early, but I can only assume Apple thinks he's too critical when he finds an issue he doesn't like. Thus he has to buy his review units on street release date along with everyone else. How many people are giving less critical reviews because of that?
So implicity only offering review units to positive reviewers is still not allowed.
Based on the text you have shared it'd be perfectly fine if you were paid to write a "neutral" review.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RZFIYJTPVUZ94?ASI...
At some point, it was determined that the sweetener (or something) in these, caused ... adverse ... reactions, in some folks.
If you look at all the reviews for that product, you will see many more, but this was the prize-winner.
Actually, I suspect that the ratings went to a different (sugared) product, or that Amazon moved the products around, so the ratings applied to something different.
The sugar-free variety was the problematic one.
When real, testimonials are hand-picked from the full set of reviews and feedback. That practice should be banned too.
Of course, creation of rules would do only so much. The real deal is ability to execute those in practice.
For positive reviews, a business will figure out customers who they already know had a positive experience (quick delivery, continuous usage, etc) and only send them invites to review. This is perfectly legal and the fundamental business model of many review websites - selling the ability to push invites and “manage” reviews.
For negative reviews - no business wants these, and customers with bad experiences are likely to post them by themselves.
What gets left out is the average experience because reviews are essentially cherry picked from the head and tail ends of the normal curve of experiences. This doesn’t render reviews useless, of course. Having a large number of positive reviews is still a positive signal but it is nowhere close to free from manipulation.
Does the rule apply to private citizens? I wonder if the First Amendment agrees with penalizing private citizens "who don’t have experience with the business or product/services, or misrepresent their experience". They may mean that businesses can't engage people to write such reviews.
Also, how will they handle the scale of enforcement? The large companies seem easy - one enforcement action covers all of Yelp, another all of Amazon, etc. But what about the infinite reviews at smaller vendoers?
Overall though, I think this is great and long past due. The lawlessness of the Internet - fraud, spying, etc. - is absurd.
I'm sure someone will try to argue that, but the way I interpreted it is that this is not banning people from sharing fake reviews, it's banning businesses from publishing and misrepresenting those reviews as genuine. i.e. It's regulating the business's practices, not the (purported) consumers'.
The rules do not apply to "reviews that appear on a website or platform as a result of the business merely engaging in consumer review hosting." 16 CFR § 465.2(d)(2) (2024) They apply (paraphrased) to things someone is paying someone else to say. Things people write about products without being paid to write them are uncontroversially First Amendment-protected opinion.
https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/federal-register-no... (starts on page 153)
- "penalizing private citizens "who don’t have experience with the business or product/services, or misrepresent their experience". They may mean that businesses can't engage people to write such reviews."
I'm not a lawyer, but I think the AP article actually misstated the law. The multiple paragraphs related to this only seem to cover the case where a review "materially misrepresented... that the reviewer used or otherwise had experience with the product". The way the AP paraphrased this is different. They separated out "or misrepresent" with an "or", but it's not separate.
Maybe I'm wrong but doesn't the first ammended apply to public speech ? Is there some nuances there when a private company is involved and responsible for the content on their platform, in this case reviews? Genuinely never sure of these things for the US.
Review curation is an especially good target for this because the question isn’t the speech but rather whose speech is promoted. Nobody gets in trouble if they accept testimonials and only use positive ones in ads because consumers know those aren’t unbiased but a review page which looks like anyone can post there is making a different promise.
Because you're free to post as many false reviews on your own personal blog. Nobody is silencing your views.
But a product page is not allowed to publish those views. And businesses have never had first amendment rights to publish falsehoods.
It's no different from ingredient listings on food. There's no first amendment right for a business to lie about the ingredients.
> with penalizing private citizens "who don’t have experience with the business or
> product/services, or misrepresent their experience". They may mean that
> businesses can't engage people to write such reviews.
The First Amendment doesn't typically protect your right to commit fraud, no.
Where is the FTC? dang might delete my comment or ban me, but the government has no right to do a thing.
The intent is clearly to prevent entities from publishing clearly fake/ill-gotten reviews. The first amendment does not protect your speech when that speech is used to assist in committing another crime. The second amendment exists, but that does not give you carte blanche to shoot people (extreme example).
For a speech related example, see the Freeman v Giuliani case[^1], where the defense stated that they "have a first amendment right to lie," which was ruled to not be the case in defamation.
Also remember that there needs to be some measurable level of harm inflicted. A silly comment in this thread is unlikely to have any measurable level of harm, but cheating reviews may result in tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales.
[^1]: APNews https://apnews.com/article/giuliani-2020-election-georgia-de...)
> It also prohibits them from ... disseminating such testimonials, when the business ... should have known that the reviews or testimonials were fake or false.
Many of the Amazon fake review practices are extremely in the "should have known" category.
Eventually the scammers will be isolated such that they're just paying each other to lie to each other, meanwhile the rest of us can be authentic with each other: we need to learn trust hygiene and bake it into our apps.
Because I'm not going to leave a review, don't really leave many reviews. But I'm especially not going to leave a review before I've received service. But if I don't leave a review, I'd be concerned I would be getting deliberately poor service.
And if I'm going to get bad service, why should I subject myself to that?
If anything, I would leave then give a 1 star review saying they give discounts to people who give good reviews beforehand and the explanation I gave above.
People cheer when government makes a rule like this but there is a huge costly enforcement mechanism that goes with this. That has to be implemented and maintained. Making the rule is step one, and there are hundreds more steps that have to happen any number of times, forever. Good luck. Making laws that cannot be enforced just increases the cost of government without having the intended effect. I can't think of anything that the prime offenders would like more than that.
It's a convoluted problem with no good answer so far.
There's actually a big cloud hanging over the Kamala Harris candidacy over whether or not Lina Khan will remain FTC chair. There's a lot of tech money flooding into her campaign. Though in this case it's also to replace the current SEC chair, because the SEC chair is actually enforcing securities law against crypto fraudsters, who would really like to keep their scam going.
Same with Trump. Big Tech banned him for, y'know, instigating a coup d'etat. But three years later, Big Tech is now trying to wine and dine him, because the FTC is scaring the shit out of Big Tech. You have Tim Cook going to Trump and Trump saying how he's going to stop the EU from attacking US companies. Hell, Elon Musk bought Twitter just so he could turn it into an arm of the Trump candidacy. And who knows what Mark Zuckerberg thinks. Likewise, with the SEC stuff, Trump used to be a (rightful) big critic of crypto, until he realized he could make money selling tacky NFTs of himself, and is now also trying to get in on that crypto money.
Well republicans generally shoot down anything that is pro-consumer at the cost of business profits, even when it's related to consumer awareness or safety, so the only way to get decent pro-consumer rules enacted is when democrats are in power.
Which is to say there is some political differences, but don't make such accusations before you carefully check to ensure it isn't just your bias to observe more when democrats are in power and thus see more.
We don't have enough information to answer them.
I guess it is still better than most companies that will find whatever reason they can not to replace faulty equipment.
> It also prohibits businesses from using “unfounded or groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or certain false public accusations.
It seems to me like most litigants believe the other case to be groundless. I'm curious how this will look from an enforcement perspective.
Its interesting to see the government stepping to make the industry around fake reviews to be illegal .. possibly the next step in five to ten years is the government saving the INternet from the onslaught of all the AI generated fake crap that's only going to get worse and worse.
Does this apply retroactively? If someone is found to have written fake reviews or paid to get them written in the past, would the rule apply to them too? (I hope so.)
Can the rule be imposed if the culprits are all outside the US? (Even if the E-commerce player is in the US, they may not (or may) have done anything wrong intentionally.)
I've had similar success by manually avoiding items that look suspicious in any way, and only buying from Amazon directly, or known reputable sellers. This takes _a lot_ of work, and makes shopping on Amazon exhausting, but I don't see how Fakespot would make this any easier. My problem is not so much detecting fake reviews, but filtering out the possible quality items from the sea of junk copycats. It often happens that entire categories of items consist of junk, and you have no other choice but to pick the least worse one. Sometimes you get unlucky, but thankfully Amazon still has good return policies to cover these cases, so it's not a total loss. The amount of returns they process must be insane.
Come to think of it, I'd really like an AI-powered service that acts as an interface to Amazon search, and does this filtering for me. Bonus points for improving search criteria and allowing filtering by country of origin, ranking reputable brands and sellers higher, etc. Since Amazon will never build this, someone please do!
If you pay me I can write the same using 1000 pages without adding anything useful.
This does not solve the problem. Fake reviewers often purchase the product on paper.
Behind the scenes, the seller may not even ship and instead buy fake shipment tracking from the shipping company.
This is much more complex than what you are thinking.
I can google a far away barber who has accumulated 17 reviews over the last 10 years. Google then allows me to shit talk the guy for the world to see. 2 minutes of effort and its free! They get to carry it around like a badge of shame forever.
You should give me a discount or ill post a negative review and unleash the roaches on your hotel. It would be rude if you didn't.
edit: I think a digital ID would be useful for real reviews.
Both sides, product/service providers and consumers, try to game the system. That makes it very hard to figure what is the truth.
Or if you bought from a third party seller, but your review is attached to an FBA product, the shipping review has nothing to do with the current item.
Switching to a seller that ships using fedex or usps would do something. We've had the inverse problem, fedex is the one that always screws up our deliveries and we actively look for sellers that don't use them.
Chocolate cake recipe, needing a lot of butter, sugar, eggs, etc.
And below it a one star review "I only replaced the eggs with aquafaba, put in just a third of sugar and a third of oil to make it healthier, used cocoa poweder instead of baking chocolate, and it was horrible, hard, clumpy, didn't taste good at all, never making this again, 1 star!"
I am in general interested in seeing free speech being replaced by truthful or well-intentioned speech. Fact-checking is hard, and GenAI is making this worse. In my opinion, it is time to reevaluate the notion of free speech.
This seems a bit redundant, doesn't it?
I’m glad they’re trying. It remains to be seen how this’ll sort out.
Let me reverse this on you, how much and what type of punishment and penalty should be levied if laws are broken?
Like this false online reviews ruling, how far should punishment and penalty go?
Depends on the impact of the crime the person was convicted of and how likely they are to do it again.
> how far should punishment and penalty go?
For companies who knowingly solicit or publish fake/compensated reviews: disgorgement of profits and refunds without conditions to everyone who asks. Repeated violations come with escalating fines that are a percentage of revenue (not profits) plus bans on company officers holding the position of officer of a publicly traded company for a number of years.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/metamask/nkbihfbeog...
I once tried reporting these blatant phishing reviews, but apparently on Google the only way to report a review is if it's "Child sexual abuse material" if it's "policy related" and only "court order" or "intellectual property" if it's legal related. It's a wholy unsatisfactory system riddled with garbage.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/deck+builder+chicago/
The a large percentage of these listings are fake. They're run by a single company who has blanketed Chicago with "lead generation" listings across several local service business industries.
You can report them to Google. Nothing gets done most of the time. Redressal form? Same thing. Escalate on the forums? Same result.
And this is only one such lead gen network that I know of. Google doesn't care.
https://www.amazon.com/Hutzler-3571-571-Banana-Slicer/produc...
Without an enforcement mechanism to monitor the millions of review websites nothing will happen.
And can you imagine the effort required to prove a review is fake?
It would make many comments here pointless if commenters started from reading this:
The final rule prohibits:
Fake or False Consumer Reviews, Consumer Testimonials, and Celebrity Testimonials:
The final rule addresses reviews and testimonials that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business or its products or services, or that misrepresent the experience of the person giving it. It prohibits businesses from creating or selling such reviews or testimonials. It also prohibits them from buying such reviews, procuring them from company insiders, or disseminating such testimonials, when the business knew or should have known that the reviews or testimonials were fake or false.
Buying Positive or Negative Reviews:
The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative. It clarifies that the conditional nature of the offer of compensation or incentive may be expressly or implicitly conveyed.
Insider Reviews and Consumer Testimonials:
The final rule prohibits certain reviews and testimonials written by company insiders that fail to clearly and conspicuously disclose the giver’s material connection to the business. It prohibits such reviews and testimonials given by officers or managers. It also prohibits a business from disseminating such a testimonial that the business should have known was by an officer, manager, employee, or agent. Finally, it imposes requirements when officers or managers solicit consumer reviews from their own immediate relatives or from employees or agents – or when they tell employees or agents to solicit reviews from relatives and such solicitations result in reviews by immediate relatives of the employees or agents.
Company-Controlled Review Websites:
The final rule prohibits a business from misrepresenting that a website or entity it controls provides independent reviews or opinions about a category of products or services that includes its own products or services.
Review Suppression:
The final rule prohibits a business from using unfounded or groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or certain false public accusations to prevent or remove a negative consumer review. The final rule also bars a business from misrepresenting that the reviews on a review portion of its website represent all or most of the reviews submitted when reviews have been suppressed based upon their ratings or negative sentiment.
Misuse of Fake Social Media Indicators:
The final rule prohibits anyone from selling or buying fake indicators of social media influence, such as followers or views generated by a bot or hijacked account. This prohibition is limited to situations in which the buyer knew or should have known that the indicators were fake and misrepresent the buyer’s influence or importance for a commercial purpose.
The normalization of blatant lying in business is really frustrating, both as a businessperson and as a member of the public. We (correctly) consider just making shit up for their own benefit a major strike against a person, but we implicitly tolerate it in the companies that run a good chunk of our lives! Hell, in some cases we even celebrate it: "wow, look how scrappy that person is, what a brilliant marketing ploy!" - no, they're just a liar.
Bunch of people report Amazon as being rife with fake reviews. FTC puts together some sort of working group that does some research to figure out if it's true. If it's true, they reach out to Amazon telling them to fix it after handing them a fine. After a while, they verify that Amazon implemented sufficient safe-guards against fake reviews.
Sure, it wouldn't get rid of all fake reviews, but surely it'd be better than the current approach of doing absolutely nothing, no?
Of course they want it. It's purely objective for them and purely deceptive to the consumer. Therefore, it's the perfect thing for the FTC to regulate - I mean this is what their purpose is.
Enforcement will be difficult, but I really think platforms like Amazon isn't the problem. They're a unified platform, it's pretty easy for them to enforce better review. Maybe you need to have actually bought the product, maybe they monitor product descriptions for asking for reviews, maybe they audit packages for those little "review us 5 stars!" slips, maybe they prevent modifying products, etc.
The true tough thing to enforce is little shops. You know, convenience stores, smoke shops, that type. I've been told, verbally, many times that if I review 5 stars, I get some discount. I doubt the FTC will send physical agents to check that.
But, I think most online buying in the US goes through Amazon and maybe a couple other online retailers. Fix it there and you fixed the problem for 90% of cases.
Remember you don't need to get everyone doing this. Even a few cases that your get on the nightly news will be enough to stop a large majority of fraud. You just need to get enough that everyone else decides not to do this.
There are a lot of outfits in Pakistan that recruit reviewers in the US by offering a full refund for Chinese products in exchange for a five star review.
This rule should require disclosure of this behavior and frankly any review that does not originate for a bonafide purchase.
> Buying Positive or Negative Reviews: The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative. It clarifies that the conditional nature of the offer of compensation or incentive may be expressly or implicitly conveyed.
> Fake or False Consumer Reviews, Consumer Testimonials, and Celebrity Testimonials: The final rule addresses reviews and testimonials that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business or its products or services, or that misrepresent the experience of the person giving it. It prohibits businesses from creating or selling such reviews or testimonials. It also prohibits them from buying such reviews, procuring them from company insiders, or disseminating such testimonials, when the business knew or should have known that the reviews or testimonials were fake or false.
Of course can't hold foreign marketplaces responsible at all - but that is a different loophole we can close (if it becomes a problem Amazon will ensure it is)
Regular people are not someone custom wants to make an example of for ordering from a banned foreign company. Large companies will carefully check their supply chain to ensure they are not buying goods from banned companies, but tiny companies and regular people won't care as much.
I expect that the EU will have (if they don't already have) rules similar to the US and countries there will generally enforce them. However other countries (China!) will not care as much.