Company fined $300,000 for posting fake reviews online | Hacker News Reader

Company fined $300,000 for posting fake reviews online

nytimes.com

60 pointsvaksel25 comments

Three cheers for the NY Attorney General. Fake commercial posts and non-disclosed pay-to-posts are clearly deceptive false advertising.

Indeed. It's a good day for common sense. Usually when laws are applied to the internet, everything flies out the windows. "Oh it's on a computer? Well that's different!"

It's nice to see false advertising on a public site treated the same way false advertising in a magazine would.

If astroturfing is false advertising, does this case mean that any review of a product is also advertising? If I post a positive review of, say, cigarettes and I don't comply with various regulations does that now open me up to having my house seized and being thrown in jail?

A company giving positive reviews as non-existent customers on consumer products for money is fraud. I worked as a reviewer and I worked hard to be honest and genuine, this kind of BS that goes on on amazon.com and places is insulting to all reviewers because generally you work very hard and don't get nearly enough pay.

Oh BTW your house is at risk with virtually any company you start until you get limited liability, so I don't really get what point you're trying to make. Almost anyone can start an ULC for the very reason that if you fail and get hugely in debt (like a large amount of companies do) then the bank still gets its money. You either need to have the money to cover your expenses up front, or you risk losing your home.

My father has run a business all his life, but all the important stuff was always in my mothers name and never joint so if he ever had a problem the house and cars weren't going to disappear without a major fight.

> The company will pay $300,000 in penalties and costs to the state. It has also agreed to stop publishing anonymous reviews on Web sites in the voices of satisfied customers and to identify any content created by employees, the statement said.

Emphasis mine. I would think that agreeing to stop the behavior that landed them in court would be implied. It would be mildly interesting to me to find out if this kind of clause is added because it needs to be added.

They always say that. Don't know why, but every time there is a settlement a clause like this is part of it. Even for things way more obviously bad than this.

I would assume the penalties could then be made even more serious, because if they do it again, they're explicitly violating the settlement agreement. So, then they'd be on the hook for violating the contract, as well as a similar deceptive advertising charge.

It's great to see people getting nailed for biased posts -- but I suspect that people posting misinformation for emotionally satisfying reasons actually cause more harm.

If the AG is serious about prosecuting harmful behavior, rather than evil capitalists, he ought to go after anyone who would rather forward an email than fact-check, or who argues for a viewpoint because of feel-good emotions ("All decent, NPR-listening, upper-middle-class white folks like me know this is right") rather than facts.

This is about stopping a form of business-funded deceptive advertising. This is not about regulating private behavior or private speech. You can say (or forward) whatever you want as an individual. The issue here is dishonest commercial speech...

I really, really hope you don't actually believe that. You seem to be arguing that a claim made for reasons you don't like is morally inferior to a more harmful claim made for reasons you do like.

Is it really worse for one commercially-minded person to say "Try Acme Widget; I hear they give great service!" than for a well-meaning person to say "No decent person can afford to give these potential Satanic Ritual Abusers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers) the benefit of the doubt."?

It's fine to say that someone should not make harmful claims due to commercial motivations. But I don't see why the motivation is the concern, not the harm of the claim. Would you rather live in a world in which harmful claims aren't made, or a world in which harmful claims are made all the time, but at least the way people are compensated for them isn't monetary.

> The issue here is dishonest commercial speech

We understand that was the target in this case. The parent was pointing out that there's more damage caused by another kind of speech.

When you lose your keys, do you look where it's easiest to look or where they're likely to be?

It's very easy to demonstrate that someone posting fake advertising is being knowingly deceptive, and being deceptive in this fashion is what's against the law. It's harder to demonstrate that the other kinds of speech you mentioned are the consequence of malice rather than ignorance.

Isn't this more or less what the parrot book guy was doing?

good point, it seems like this would take out all of those landing page type sites

Assuming that the reviews are in fact fake. How would you determine this?

well for one, noone writes like they do in those reviews. You can taste the fakeness

Someone does...

This is funny. There's going to be a huge applause for this post but whenever there's an article about an individual being prosecuted for piracy... it's the evil RIAA.

Edit: I'm not trying to turn this into a a piracy argument but I do think there's a double standard there.

The part that incites anger isn't prosecuting someone for behavior on the internet, it's the actual behavior. Astro-turfing reviews hurts consumers and thus this prosecution is applauded by consumers. Consumers downloading music hurts the producers and thus is applauded by the producers (well, some of them).

It's really not hard to understand why seeing the "little" guy be attacked incites more popular anger than the reverse.

I think it's pretty obvious why the little guy story is more popular but i think both stories are pretty much the same.

Numbers aside, putting a significant fine on a company that's breaking the law is no different than a fine on an individual. It's meant to make an example out of them to discourage similar behavior in the future... no?

So by this standard, HN should applaud prosecutions and searches under the new blasphemy laws in Ireland, because breaking the law is no different, no matter the law?

These headlines will typically turn into a cheercamp and I was just pointing that out. I probably worded it poorly but let's not applaud or boo at all.

This is a little different, though, isn't it? The RIAA does things like sue an individual for $300,000, well beyond what most individuals even have, much less are able to pay. This company was paying their staff to be fraudulent, and are likely in a better position to take the $300,000 fine as a slap on the wrist than individuals are.

I might even applaud the RIAA for helping to stop copyright violations (which, right or wrong, are indeed illegal) if they fined individuals for the price of a few albums rather than for a decade's worth of their salary.

It would be impossible to fine each individual the price of a few albums. They have to grab headlines with a huge figure and hope that it scares enough people away. It's a battle for headlines, they're not actually expecting to see that money.

Just curious, what law where they breaking?

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