Amazon is listed as one of the companies receiving the notice, though as the list says that's not evidence that they've done anything wrong. Google, Pepsi, and others who are unlikely to be involved in this are there too
> Google, Pepsi, and others who are unlikely to be involved in this are there too
It's possible for big companies to "be involved" via third parties. For instance, Big Company pays Big Agency, who allocates some spend to Unscrupulous Digital Marketing Firm or Shady Digital Advertising Service.
This doesn't mean that Big Company intentionally engaged in bad behavior but on the other hand, big companies tend to work with so many third parties that "hear no evil, see no evil" and plausible deniability are built in to their operations.
This list is.. extensive, including tech darlings (Airbnb, Beats[Apple], Epic Games, Facebook, Lyft, Netflix, PayPal, Razer, Uber, WhatsApp(FB), YouTube(google)) too "big to fail" (3M, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Dell, Google, HP, Ikea, LG, LVHM, Microsoft, Walmart, Walt Disney), fast food (Applebee's, Arby's, Burger King, Dairy Queen, Domino's, Ferrero, Hershey, Kashi, Kellogg McDonald's, Kraft Heinz, Olive Garden, Pizza the hutt, Wendy's), covid vaccines (AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer). But also duplicates (AutoZone Parts/AutoZone Stores/AutoZone/Autozone.com, Best Buy Co/BestBuy.com, Big Lots Online/Big Lots Inc, Activision Blizzard/Activision Publihsing/Blizzard Entertainment, Cargill Meat Solutions/Cargill, many others). Shout out to Moderna for not making the list, and Gap Inc (Banana Republic, Old Navy) for getting all brands in.
> Google, Pepsi, and others who are unlikely to be involved in this are there too
Bear in mind, this is not just about "fake reviews" like people submit on Amazon. This is about "falsely claiming an endorsement by a third party; misrepresenting whether an endorser is an actual, current, or recent user; using an endorsement to make deceptive performance claims; failing to disclose an unexpected material connection with an endorser; and misrepresenting that the experience of endorsers represents consumers’ typical or ordinary experience"
I guarantee you both Google and Pepsi have committed offenses on that list, and so has nearly everyone else in modern marketing these days.
Section 230 protects Amazon from this. They could still go after Amazon if they believe Amazon is negligent in fake user review controls. On paper I think Amazon probably does a lot, but probably not enough.
They should probably build the right tech to detect fake reviews and dismantle fake reviewing rings.
But this is not an opportunity of growth for Amazon. It is not a business critical area either and certainly is not perceived as meaningful threat or weakness.
More aggressive investments in this area aren’t justified because it truly doesn’t have a clear effect on the bottom line.
Reputationally, I doubt they care. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of vendors who sell up to 12 millions SKUs to hundreds of millions of customers.
It just makes sense to invest in tools and programs for the hundreds of millions of legit interactions (including reviews) that happen on their platform, than focusing too heavily on those who are not playing by the rules.
I'm not clear on whether the majority of fake reviews come from "fake review rings" that could be identified, or from what we might call "certain business practices" which could be extremely hard to detect. Do you have any sense of which one dominates?
Very simple - if they have fake reviews, they should be fined. If they can't do anything about it, they can innovate a "Customer Obsession" business model. It looks like Leadership Principles go down the drain when it affects the top line.
How do you propose to identify fake reviews? What is about a fake review that makes it fake? What is about a person writing a fake review that makes a fake reviewer?
> It isn't really Amazon that does it though, it's the sellers on Amazon.
If Amazon doesn't want the responsibility of having to make sure stuff on their website is actually legal, then maybe they shouldn't have made letting everyone sell stuff on their site their entire business model.
They want all the profits of being a middleman but without taking any of the associated responsibility. It's a hilariously crap excuse.
FWIW I find useful info in many reviews on Amazon. It's still better than everything else I've seen out there. It sucks to have to spend so much time trying to find the nuggets of honest info, but they are there.... unlike most non-Amazon sites I have had the misfortune to use in the past.
On Amazon it's easy: if it's got hundreds of reviews, it's probably mostly fake reviews.
Even for those products if you spend some time you'll find some nuggets of useful information in there.
Contrast with some furniture site I went to some months ago, where there are only like 5 reviews per product and all of them are so completely fake. They assured me the desk was "very stable" which should have tipped me off already ... Later I noticed this "brand" is all over Amazon and each of their products has hundreds of positive reviews.. they are so easy to spot on Amazon... not so much on other sellers where they rebrand the product, have ten times less product info in the description, less photos etc.
The only useful reviews on Amazon in my experience are 1-star reviews. But the absence of 1-star reviews doesn't imply a good product, so I've frankly just stopped buying stuff from Amazon that isn't clearly a name brand and not replaceable by a counterfeit. The idea of trying to buy even something as simple as a cable on Amazon based on reviews fills me with dread.
Random thought: before the Internet were reviews any better? I know there were/are quality reviews like Consumer Reports and such. But were there any crowdsourced reviews?
Are we worse off or are we just needing to protect people from their inability to scrutinize a new source of bad data?
The internet makes it easier to hide your identity, automate attacks, and reach a large audience at practically no cost.
For example, if I want to influence Skippy peanut butter's review score online I can just leave fake reviews on a few dozen products on a few dozen websites with a few dozen (maybe hundred) fake accounts. Alternatively, I could make up something on social media and hope it goes viral. If I wanted to do the same in the physical world I'd have to pay for some massive marketing campaign which would trace right back to me.
People either got their reviews from quality, trusted third parties like Consumer Reports, or they got reviews from friends.
It would be pretty expensive to bribe consumer reports, and it isn't as cost effective to pay someone to give fake recommendations to their friends as it is to pay for fake recommendations on a website. Although some companies do that; it is called multi level marketing.
Yeah...they were good even after the internet became big...for a while, but the last few years have been so far downhill I don't even look to them anymore.
Does it? It doesn't matter if we know the reviews aren't as good, people still don't seem willing to pay for good reviews. Many companies have tried, but I haven't heard of any success stories yet.
Plenty of people are. CR is still in business. However, there is an issue with the quality of CR dropping in recent years. Why pay for a service that is getting worse?
I think a big part of the problem is that manufacturers and big stores do a thing where Best Buy gets model XAB234b, Costco gets model XAB234c, and Home Depot gets model XAB234h. They're almost identical in specs and features. This mattress has 2" of foam while one has 1.5" and another 2.5". Or one dishwasher has the controls on the top while the others have it on the front but one has a latch with a bar handle and one has a latch without a bar handle.
They're all "different" so they can't be price-compared and the models don't match exactly the model that Consumer Reports reviews.
The price discrimination has really upped its game. I find that you really have to look at a vendor / brand’s trajectory for clues on how likely you are to being ripped off.
If a brand is in financial trouble, or just got bought, then buyer beware because the costs are going to be cut and one easy way to increase profits today is reduce quality and increase price.
If a vendor is having trouble, then same thing there where they might slack off on vetting their stock and whatnot.
What I see frequently happening is the market diverges into a high quality, high priced option, and then a veritable mess of quality:price ratio options where the typical person has to rely on the quality being proportional to the price as long as the vendor is reputable and has good management (ie not in financial distress or being bled).
Pre-Internet, people got a lot of review from magazines. Consumer Reports was unique at that time for not accepting advertising on products it reviewed and it's still somewhat unique that way.
I think whether someone got advice from friends pre-Internet varied by what you were buying. Your friends couldn't tell what type of professional speakers to buy, for example unless they were musicians and then they likely had arbitrary biases.
>Random thought: before the Internet were reviews any better?
Before the internet, there were these things called "magazines". These magazines earned money by selling ads.
Advertisers sold products that were reviewed in the magazines they advertised in. And if a magazine's review was unfavorable to an advertisers product, that advertiser could reduce their ad spending.
Also, advertisers could "bribe" reviewers. Probably not with direct cash payments, but it was generally expected that a reviewer would be "gifted" the product reviewed.
Yeah, but there was/is more balance when the magazine had to keep its overall readership up and quite possibly had a manufacturer’s competitive advertising as well. Advertisers could influence reviews, especially to keep from getting a super low review, but I don’t recall stupendous reviews for absolute rubbish.
In many fields, though, there were the magazines that everbody knew were bought and sold by advertisers, and those that weren't. In my domain, Sound on Sound (about pro-audio and music creation tech) is in the latter category, and has been for decades. Even the advertisers know it, and seem willing to deal with the periodic "actually, the new Foo from Bar is mostly a piece of junk that you will not want to buy" because it makes the "wow, the new Baz from Bomb is totally awesome and you will use it everyday".
Some but very limited. Zagat was one for restaurants but they sold out to Google. I used to buy their books/do reviews in exchange for free books. Certainly imperfect but I liked their results pretty well probably because their reviewers lined up pretty well with my preferences--i.e. semi-serious survey.
And many quantitative things including TV ratings involved consumer surveys/polling.
Before the Internet? Other than advertisements, any information about a product came from word of mouth (family and friends) or from magazines like Consumer Reports. How would crowdsourced reviews even be generated or disseminated? The only way for large groups of people to talk to each other was in person.
Buying reviews has long been a thing. Snake oil sales persons were standing on markets selling their bottles of oil, they paid people to come up and "buy" a bottle and do a review in front of the crowd.
I think the point is you didn't rely on reviews. Before the internet you went to the shop and you could actually touch the product, try on clothes, use sporting goods, see how this laptop feels and how fast it works. Now buying online you have to trust reviews to choose what to buy.
I think this is bit simplistic. Before the internet, if you were going to buy something that was supposed to have objectively measurable properties, there would likely be a magazine/zine/journal that would include reviews by domain experts. Shovel? Laptop? Scalpel? Engine oil? Covered, you just bought the magazine.
The problem now is that the magazines are generally not as good at covering all the options, many of them have vanished, or have become online only equivalents.
Also, this is in part what the Whole Earth Catalog (later CoEvolution Quarterly and even later Whole Earth Review) was all about, and that's why more than a few people see it as a precursor to the web.
Before the internet, brick and mortar stores and distributors had 'buyers' who were intimately familiar with products in their particular sector. They would review products and decide how many to order if any. If you wanted to sell some consumer product you'd have to ship pre-production models to the buyers. They would test them and tear them down to see how well they were built. That imposed reasonable quality standards on manufacturers.
It is not solely Amazon. It mirrors the widening gap in income/wealth in society. Walmart and BestBuy were already selling models of appliances slightly tweaked to have inferior components at cheaper prices, imperceptible to people who were not doing deep research online.
Although the veneer of quality Amazon have to third party sellers certainly exacerbated the issue, but I think that is close to exhaustion.
This is also simplistic. I lived before the Internet, and I can't remember the number of times I tried to buy some sort of product from a specialist store that turned out not to carry a product because they instead carried those of a competitor? Was it because the one they carried was better? Sometimes, perhaps. But often it was because of a better business arrangement, and those arrangements were often informally exclusionary to competition.
With online commerce, and particularly Amazon, the testers are now us, the consumers, and the scale of testing is far wider and deeper, which seems like a good thing in some respects. However, apart from the onus now falling on us, which might or might not be a good thing, there's the problem of getting past the "top rated" items in a given domain, and that might be a really big problem.
Before the internet you went to the shop and you could actually touch the product, try on clothes, use sporting goods, see how this laptop feels and how fast it works.
Sure, if you were going to a store. Catalogs were popular for many decades (if not a full century or more). I definitely remember my parents ordering from JCPenny and Sears catalogs: Music catalogs (near scams) let you buy music you might not hear. I've personally had catalogs for jewelry making supplies before the internet got adequate and safe enough to order from.
And you realistically just had to hope it was good enough. You probably didn't have reviews at all and just had to hope to trust the company or brand - but lets be real, you didn't always have this. Returns either meant driving to a physical store or spending some time on the phone before going to the post office to return.
> we just needing to protect people from their inability to scrutinize a new source of bad data?
I think this places more blame on the consumer than is due. Sure people need to understand how to interpret data, but a lot of this is plain fraud. Fake reviews are fraud. They make a product seem better than it is. Its sorta like false advertising, in a way.
A lot of modern times uses automated systems, eg. maybe amazon top page might require 4+ stars, etc. This would normally be a positive feedback loop (good products get in front of more people, more reviews if good means stronger basis for being in front). With fake reviews, you're disrupting the systems we have for everyone, hurting other brands (if not directly through slander campaigns) and also acting fraudulently.
Aside word from mouth, certain magazines that you'd trust (or unsubscribe otherwise), the most prominent part was: the brand name.
Before moving to Taiwan (and then China) a lot of the goods were produced quite locally and not outsourced, so it was even possible to have a most so remote relationship to the factory/engineers responsible for a product.
The brand is still a thing, yet a lot of brands are owned by the same mega corporation and effectively produced/assembled in the same outsourced factory with unknown amount of suppliers.
no way to reliably prove if review is fake or not. nothing to stop someone from having friends and family leave positive reviews or just make multiple accounts. If someone leaves a glowing review for a shitty product, then technically it is still real.
There's a whole fraud economy that has emerged in the last decade or so. Its existence has done deep harm to social trust, in my opinion. It extends far beyond just fake reviews of course; it reaches deep into the corrupt business practices and politicians/governments around the world.
How do you know reviews were more reliable before ? In pretty much all industries people were hacking reviews before especially when channels were more limited. Nobody invented fraud yesterday.
People still get that. They just also get reviews from others online. Forums have been invaluable to me for finding out information about niche fields where I do not have a person familiar with that in my social circles.
Reviews were more "expert"-based 20 years or so again in magazines that had some editorial oversight and processes for selecting and reviewing products.
Of course, there were far fewer reviews available, companies still gamed reviewers/magazines but in different ways, and there was sometimes outright fraud around benchmarks, etc.
A huge portion of those reviews were payola, plain and simple. If a reviewer didn’t provide at least a somewhat positive review (even for complete dreck), they were often blacklisted.
Blacklisted how? 20 years ago consumer reports was considered a trusted source and they purchased everything they reviewed. How are you going to blacklist someone from going to the store and buying your product?
Consumer Reports buys the products they review. They can't be blacklisted if they're not relying on the manufacturer to send them a free demo/item.
(Youtube/Blog) Reviewers get blacklisted by companies by not providing a positive review about a product they were given. As they rely on scooping type style reviews, this means they not only don't get a free product to review, but they can't review it until after it's for sale instead of being able to 'preview' it for people and get more clicks that way.
Only problem is that CR then needs to wait until release day to start its review. While the corrupt get advance copies to review that get released in advance, or are embargoed until release day, but still, will get published way before CR can publish a proper review.
Honestly "don't buy stuff right after it comes out" is one of the simplest things you can do as a consumer to not buy a lot of lemons, even if you don't read Consumer Reports.
The "gotta have everything day one (or earlier!) to be cool!" is the most successful piece of meta-marketing imaginable.
Consumer Reports was (and still is!) so trusted because it is the one publication that lacks the usual conflicts of interest that every other publication has.
The Wirecutter (now part of NY Times) is another that doesn't accept freebie products, if I recall.
They do use affiliate links, so they have incentive to want you to buy _something_, but no incentive to give any particular brand or model a biased review.
As long as it's a generic referral program (Amazon?) in general I find it at least somewhat ok - I can see how they're getting paid, and I can assume (maybe?) they aren't getting a special kickback to sell that particular product over another one at Amazon or whatever.
When it's seller specific affiliate programs? It's all just spam basically.
I still can't believe people actually click on affiliate/tracking links. I get things based on Wirecutter reviews occasionally, but I always go to the product separately so it's not tracked.
CR is the exception, and that’s why they charge their subscribers a lot of money.
The vast majority of publications fund “reviews” in different ways.
Some publications you can pay to have your product “featured” in.
In some others, companies give a reviewer who has a reputation for favorable reviews free products. The unspoken expectation is that the reviews will drive sales and that the free product (and free content) train keeps going.
And yet others have serious conflicts of interest with their supporting advertisers.
A lot of reviewers try to be relevant by reviewing new things before they hit the market. That makes the manufacturer the only source of the product and the manufacturers have no reason to provide early access to people writing bad reviews and writing a review a month after everyone else just doesn't attract nearly as much attention.
No, no, let me rephrase: they would give good reviews to everyone that gave them free stuff that was good.
Customers asked "why aren't there any review saying a product is bad", so they started doing that with products whose manufacturers didn't advertise there or didn't give free stuff for review. They'd borrow, or buy a few Danelectro or Behringer pedals for $30 dollars just to make a bad review and "save face" to readers.
Basically they got "token bad products" to save face.
You definitely need a bottle for when you get some terrible product and you know the manufacturer won't like that it won't get reviewed.
Funny enough, the situation is even worse now: with YouTube reviewers, there's no more expectation of neutrality as with professional journalists in the past. So all quality reviews are praising products.
The "fraud economy" was democratized in the last decade but it has always existed. Previously you needed to be rich, powerful, and well connected to have media companies cover your business/product. Now you can buy fake engagement, reviews, upvotes, etc with a few click so everyone does it. If you don't do it you will be outcompeted by the ones who do. I've experienced this myself. I tried buying ads and writing organic posts but got little traffic on a site I wanted to promote. Then I decided to spend a few hundred dollars on fake upvotes and my ROI was easily 20x better than on ads. I had to be a bit more careful so it wasn't too obvious but I learned that these dark patterns work. I've heard of similar tactics used by unicorn startups in their early stages at much larger scale. The reviews weren't trustworthy before either, it's just more obvious now.
What I find funny is when some multibillion company buys tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, but each post gets like 1 like or 1 comment. Like, hello!!!!!
But maybe it's because of FTC rules: fake followers are legally okay, but fake likes and fake comments could be considered a fake review and therefore FTC violation.
Another giveaway is accounts posting multi-sentence comments or reviews within seconds of their previous submissions. How can this get past bot checks is beyond me
The social networks don't mind the bots if it leads to engagement. Their "anti-bot" policy is a joke. They know who the bots are. They only ban the ones that are anti-engagement (which they can also determine).
Just a couple of days back, something had been bothering me about some new-ish commenters I'd encountered on Reddit, so I did an unscientific check. I realised that about a year or so back, Reddit quietly made it so that when you create an account, they autosuggest a username of the form "Word1-Word2-Number" or "Word1Word2Number", making it hard to tell apart from automated bot/astroturf accounts.
(Try it out -- look at the profiles of any account you encounter that has the above form, and they've been created pretty much always on/after October 2020)
My conspiracy theory is that this was a growth marketing hack to muddy the obvious differences between regular people accounts and bots/spammers.
For the same reason that on facebook I still get daily friend requests from very sexy women with a brand new profile, 4 friends total, none in common, in a random location in the world with 1 post linking to some dating site. It's because they just don't care. Well, either that or facebook engineers are completely incompetent.
This really isn't true. Remember that FB has many, many users and (presumably) many, many scammers, so one would expect to see lots of scams.
I too get those (messages lately) friend requests, and almost always by the time I read the message the account has been deactivated (when it says FB user).
So, overall, I think they're doing a reasonably good job on this particular problem.
My experience is different. I have many times reported a profile like this. Exactly as described above, a child can see it's a scam account. And then a couple of days later got message that after review the profile doesn't violate the community standards.
really? That's very odd (not that their reporting system sucks, it definitely does), but that you need to report it.
Interesting that we have such different experiences, I wonder why that is. (remember that on FB, a 1 in a million event occurs approximately 3k times per day).
>>> The "fraud economy" was democratized in the last decade but it has always existed. Previously you needed to be rich, powerful, and well connected to have media companies cover your business/product. Now you can buy fake engagement, reviews, upvotes, etc with a few click so everyone does it.
Yes. And this is a pattern we are seeing all over - thank you. It's it necessarily good or bad. just more open, democratic, cheaper.
The fact that it was previously restricted to only monied interests means that it was relatively rare in the past. Yes, there were the magazines and floating 'reviewers' who everyone learned were shills for whatever company was paying them for a good review, but the bulk of the reviews were earnestly trying to live up to consumer expectations for such reviews. Once things became more 'democratic' and cheaper we saw the review version of Gresham's Law at work -- fraudulent reviews flooded out sincere ones and the system has mostly because useless for its intended purpose, it is now just another marketing channel.
One example I can remember from 10+ years ago was newegg. I don't recall ever really feeling like I got "duped" based on the many online reviews there. I think that sentiment was pretty well revered and not just my personal opinions of it. Everything was pretty well spot on from my experiences. That said, I have no idea how that would fair these days.
I'll even go so far as to say back when Amazon was getting started their reviews were a lot more reliable as well.
Honestly, I think 3rd party sellers are half the problem. Eliminating them won't fix everything though, since there are sites where the 1st party itself is dishonest (e.g., yelp), but if you trust the site and it is all 1st party then you're in a good state for reviews, since there's little incentive for anyone to fake them.
There would be far fewer of them, and the consequences may not be worth it. That is why trust in a Target or Costco vetted vendor is higher than a small time seller named “eBizValue”.
>Honestly, I think 3rd party sellers are half the problem.
Totally agree. Right now there's a spread from anyone can review anything (yelp, Google reviews) to purchase required to review. What if only 1 out of 20 purchases, selected randomly, were allowed to place a review?
Single person review shops become easier to spot - they are suddenly ordering way more than typical. Returns might skyrocket, which is expensive for everyone involved, however there's now another signal available to spot odd patterns of behavior.
Inclusion of a restocking fee, which is obviously not popular with consumers, is another option which would help make it more expensive to fake reviews.
Newegg reviews were pretty good--they steered me away from a lot of noisy gear when building servers. That kind of feedback does not exist in the specs.
It should be pointed out that current fake review issues are not just on fraudulent products.
For instance Aukey has been caught by Amazon, but in my experience their products were pretty good, and they probably played the fake review game mainly due to everyone else playing it, and it became an arms race.
The cynical take Aukey was taken out because they had good products and good reputation in a high margin category that Amazon wanted for their house brand to play a bigger role in.
- they can really fix it (e.g. by kicking every fake review mandator) and drown competiting products far below in the search results, leaving "Amazon's choice" ones at the top.
With way fewer reviews it will be harder to argue the ranking results legitimacy.
- they don't fix it, and as you say, get an excuse to kick any random brand trying to stay afloat on their platform.
"Amazon's Choice" are also littered with fake reviews. WSJ did a story on this and looked at hundreds of "[AC]" listings and found majority of listings had fake reviews; many of the fake reviews being the top reviews.
It was based upon a tree of trust. And at least there was a synthetic consensus everyone agreed upon. Everyone was misled by state media, but now people switch from one tree of trust to another, depending on predictive power, which leads into conspiracy trees, because they always predict the worst outcome. A clock that screams doom all day long, will never betray you.
Youre right that I can't be sure at a macro level, but I personally found Amazon reviews more useful and accurate relative to the things I actually bought a decade ago than I do now.
Don't forget all media especially political and world news media!
Zero trust in any of those reality TV outlets.
I mean there are tons of resources and sites now to fact check the media (whether that's the media themselves like USA Today's fact checking section to non-profits), which is ridiculous if such resources are needed to constantly check what's true or not. Thus, i've tuned out and not a fan of people who plug themselves into their media machine of choice and live/die by it. They do not think for themselves rather their idiot media machine controls them!
>They do not think for themselves rather their idiot media machine controls them!
Everyone ultimately has to rely on authorities about subjects. From parents to scientist.
It's a dilemma, you can't know/research everything your self but you also shouldn't trust blindy everything you get told, so there is no final solution.
The only thing you can do is never stop questioning, falsify everything, don't deem anything above it as sacred. This way, you will collect a shifting world view from all sources.
If you don't engage with your news channels, if you don't question in a meaningful way, if you discredit whole groups of outlets just by virtue, you have surrendered.
I think it existed before, controlled by larger parties (media etc, professional reviewers and critics). With the rise of the internet, there was a brief period where anyone could share their opinion with you, and sellers hadnt figured it out yet. Now they mostly have and we're back where we were or worse.
It's an open secret that stores on amazon will send out free goods in return for positive reviews. The people "buy" items by the dozen and then resell them as third parties.
Why would it come down on Amazon? They’re not writing fake reviews. Fake reviews are commissioned by sellers of shitty products. Sometimes to their competitors in false flag operations.
And those sellers are just paying for ambiguous marketing services and the fraudulent reviews just happen to get written by someone in another country, who received a small sum in Monero every now and then for some reason.
Where does the buck stop? Amazon directly benefits from having rosy reviews of
The products sold on its platform and they don’t do enough to keep their sellers honest.
Amazon is criminally negligent at least, and I'd say enabling the deception in practice. They do scummy things like censoring (rejecting) legitimate negative reviews and letting sellers reassign positive reviews from a product to a completely different one.
> “Advertisers will pay a price if they engage in these deceptive practices.”
> These include, but are not limited to: falsely claiming an endorsement by a third party; misrepresenting whether an endorser is an actual, current, or recent user; using an endorsement to make deceptive performance claims; failing to disclose an unexpected material connection with an endorser; and misrepresenting that the experience of endorsers represents consumers’ typical or ordinary experience.
Is the notice here you just can't advertise the fake reviews? Nothing on actually trying to curtail the fake reviews that show up on commerce sites?
Genuinely curious if commerce sites will need to start policing reviews.
You don't need to advertise to be "failing to disclose an unexpected material connection with an endorser", I think maybe they mean they could punish for the reviews themselves, but they're still talking about going after the companies with the products reviewed, not the commerce sites hosting the reviews. Which is what the the FTC does (as a drop in the ocean lately), maybe all they have statutory authority to do?
Better 25 years late then never? It's probably been a common thing since at least '96 on e-commerce platforms, I don't know why it was tolerated so long.
Did they actually do any investigating here? Reading the letter it sounds like they are just reminding companies that could be fined, not that any of them have actually done anything
A lot of them allow customers to write reviews that the platforms may or may not have reason to know are fake. But good reviews are to the benefit of their bottom line so they might be incentivized to look the other way even if they have reason to believe they’re not genuine — Amazon, Apple, and Airbnb for example. It’s pretty common knowledge the reviews on those sites are frequently gamed. Any “platform” service that allows user reviews where the platform get’s a cut of the sale or where a part of their payment is contingent on a sale occurring is reasonable to include on the list I think.
I was pretty surprised to see a PE firm on the list, though.
For all we know Amazon and the big corporations will be protected, and small businesses will be targeted. Everything political is a scam and a racket to some degree. FTC included.
Biggest problem for FTC is going to be attribution. Fake reviewers are a huge racket, who has figured out a number of ways to look like genuine reviewer while taking an incentive from the businesses for it actually is, a fake review.
Businesses do engage with genuine reviewers which makes it even harder to identify real from fake.
A good friend of mine quit selling on Amazon because, as he put it "I didn't sign-up to compete with the Mafia".
Among the long list of issues he rattles off during a conversation are things like fake reviews on their products (the Mafia) as well as them paying teams to plant fake reviews on competitors products to have them tank in ranking.
The other one that was interesting was when an unknown Mafioso paid a team to click on competitors ads on Amazon. The net effect was that they consumed the daily budget by 6 AM and they went through the day without a single sale. In other words, the ROI went to zero on advertising.
Amazon denied it at first. He pressed on and provided details. After six months Amazon admitted they had determined this to be true. They refunded him some advertising money. They never restored the ranking he lost to the criminal.
Even worse, they absolutely refused to share any data with him (and presumably others). In other words, there was no way to seek legal remedies other than, potentially, filing a lawsuit against Amazon. Financial asymmetry aside, the biggest problem is that they keep very tight controls over the data. Which means you will have an almost impossible time proving anything unless you have the financial horsepower to hire an impressive team of attorneys to wage battle against an entire floor of Amazon attorneys. In other words, the little guy gets screwed, has to take it and shut up. Move on.
Fake reviews are so frustratingly common now. Hotels and restaurants are obviously buying fake reviews. Go look on basically any review site and so many reviews are from accounts with only 1-5 reviews leaving VERY generic and brief reviews. You can no longer trust Yelp, Google Reviews, or any of the other travel reviews. It sucks! There needs to be a website that forces some form of review verification. We need a new Yelp. Also, if you leave a negative review businesses will do everything they can to have it taken down. I stayed at a terrible hotel a few years back and even though my review was highly reviewed, they eventually took it down for some random reason. I no longer have any faith in online reviews on any website. Word of mouth is the only thing you can rely on.
Maybe a silly question, but is there a special way to report fake reviews, or is it just the normal site? [0] I was semi-scammed (they delivered what was promised, but the quality was awful) by a specialized goods dealer. A few years later, I see the business has attempted to whitewash its Google reviews with recent stellar feedback from obviously-fake people (e.g., "Matthew McConaughey"). I reported them to Google, but I see the reviews are still up as of this writing.
Agreed. AMEX really goes to bat for you. The few times I have had an issue they go after the issue with tenacity. No hassle to me beyond a 2 min phone call.
I had the opposite experience: the one time I've tried to use this with Amex they were completely useless. We had a fraudulent $200 charge on our business card, and Amex ruled in the merchant's favor after being presented with an unsigned PDF "receipt" that was nothing but the text "Digital Software... $200"
I second this. Rented a house on VRBO. Arrived to find a rundown flop house and had to find other accomodations for my family (3000 miles from home on minutes notice). VRBO has zero consumer protections or support for renters. I got taken for $2200. Since I paid with a debit card...screwed. Amex from now on.
I would add to the other poster - I use visa, and it is easy as well. I call, report a scam/fraud. Within 10 days the money is back on my card. I have never had an issue with this process.
A couple of days ago I realised that I started treating vast amounts of followers or positive reviews as a red flag.
This first happened as I was looking at a Blackmagicdesign product with staggeringly many 5-star reviews and seemingly zero <4-star ones. Sure, some of them are sincere, but what am I supposed to think if I know that even the best product in the world is bound to have poor feedback from bad units, mismatched expectations, courier mishaps, etc.?
Those manufacturer could be innocent; outlier where somehow everyone’s satisfied. Still, it’s an illustration of the erosion of trust in a world where buying fake reviews, followers, etc. has become the norm. Platforms, sellers—pretty much everyone profits from it, just not the end customer. For a business (seller, influencer, entertainer, etc.), it looks like if you don’t do it then your competitor will.
I believe many would give this a second thought if an authority has drawn a clear line saying “that’s illegal”. (I’m sure platforms have it in their ToS, but they are rarely read and the implicit consensus is that they’re, of course, enforced when it benefits the company.) Even if it’s difficult to prosecute each case, a few precedents and the understanding of the illegality could do wonders.
Indeed -- the real meat often is in two star reviews. One star is a knee jerk reaction, competitor buying fake review and more, usually useless. But two star typically means someone thought a bit before writing it. I found many genuine problems with products reading two star review -- and more than once, I decided to do buy because the problems were acceptable. This tactic works more often than not but I am worried what happens when this last bastion fails and two stars get flooded with fake BS.
My tactic is similar: find 2–3 star reviews; find what they didn’t like; if it’s for reasons irrelevant to me—buy. Sadly, it breaks when there’s a flood of paid reviews or when factual reviews are censored.
> 3/5 should be the baseline for acceptable service, and 4/5 reserved for exceptional quality
My first experience of this was in rideshare reviews, as a driver. Anything below five stars and it counts as a mark against you, for which eventually you can be deactivated. Then I started seeing this behavior copied everywhere. It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I agree with you on what it should mean, but unfortunately I've got no idea how to convince businesses of this.
For that reason I think it’s worth drawing a distinction between rating service by very small businesses (taxi drivers, family-run guesthouses, etc.) vs. a mass/retail product.
Rating the former tends to be 1) personal, 2) having much influence over individual’s livelihood, and 3) much more dependent on my preexisting expectations. If there was something I didn’t like, I try to not give any rating instead of rating poorly unless there was an exceptional issue.
Rating a product, especially by a bigger company, 1) does not necessarily criticise the company itself (I can still admire it while objectively having bad experience with a unit) and 2) has much less influence over company’s overall success (my review is probably a drop in the ocean), and 3) I tend to think of it as more objective than rating a service (compared to a service provided by a human, when evaluating a physical product there’re absurdly fewer variables and you’d be better informed about what you’re supposed to expect based on tech specs).
Glad to see the FTC doing something. Sometimes I think the government itself gets too political so it's nice to hear about the government just providing services and protecting consumers.
Good. Now also fine game companies releasing broken products. Fine any company selling products with "warranty void if removed" stickers. Mass shut down fake sale websites that do not sell the product imaged. I want to see the ftc breaking down doors and deleting entire companies off the face of the earth for their illigal practices. I can dream of course.
It is staggering the extent to which we as a society tolerate flagrant lying[0] and I worry about the long reaching implications of the inevitable erosion of trust it will cause.
[0]A personal pet peeve: Dump trucks with 'not liable for broken windshields' on the back. A patently incorrect assertion in every jurisdiction I've come across, written for the express intent of coercing wronged persons out of owed compensation. Yet somehow this doesn't seem to meet the bar for criminal fraud.
This really is something you just Google, it's not uncommon at all. I just Googled "broken game release" and all I saw were examples. Cyberpunk was a recent high profile one.
Some of my all-time favorite games in that list so I definitely do not agree that those companies should be fined. I've gotten extremely good bang for the buck considering the thousands of hours I've put in.
Elite Dangerous: Odyssey. Couldn't even get a refund because it took more than 2 hours to get the game to even play, still was broken. Company stole $60 from me and somehow never fined.
I've had a couple experiences recently where I leave a bad review on a junk "top rated" product and they contact me offering free product or sometimes even money to remove it.
Thanks. About 8 years too late to save my business... Scanner911. Killed by fake reviews on Apple's App Store. RIP
In reality vast swaths of the world economy are entirely fake, supported with fake reviews, or fake analyst stock calls.
It can be argued that much of the value in the technology space is entirely fake. Look at the current insane multiples.
My point is that all this lying is supercharged due to Fed printing money. And a sizable part of that problem was caused by a near 20 year war with Afghanistan & Iraq -- completely useless wars - as most are. With the world teetering into collapse due to climate change. And most "technologists" more interested in travel to Mars.
The real technology in this world is biological. Way beyond human understanding. So go and make some silly new technology. Get some VC money to pump it up into the land of nonsense valuation. Hurry up, get yours before the whole pile falls back into the gutter.
"completely useless war", this is true for people living in Afghanistan. From the military perspective ability to test equipment, tactics, soldier's skills in a very difficult territory, without risking too many casulties is invaluable. No other major army has similar combat experience.
Yes, Afgan war costed a lot, but people do the math in the wrong way. The same troops would have to be fed and trained at home too, equipment had to be maintained, etc. so this kind of fixed maintenance and training costs should be subtracted from the overall Afghanistan campaign costs.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadhttps://www.ftc.gov/system/files/attachments/penalty-offense...
It's possible for big companies to "be involved" via third parties. For instance, Big Company pays Big Agency, who allocates some spend to Unscrupulous Digital Marketing Firm or Shady Digital Advertising Service.
This doesn't mean that Big Company intentionally engaged in bad behavior but on the other hand, big companies tend to work with so many third parties that "hear no evil, see no evil" and plausible deniability are built in to their operations.
Bear in mind, this is not just about "fake reviews" like people submit on Amazon. This is about "falsely claiming an endorsement by a third party; misrepresenting whether an endorser is an actual, current, or recent user; using an endorsement to make deceptive performance claims; failing to disclose an unexpected material connection with an endorser; and misrepresenting that the experience of endorsers represents consumers’ typical or ordinary experience"
I guarantee you both Google and Pepsi have committed offenses on that list, and so has nearly everyone else in modern marketing these days.
They are liable
But this is not an opportunity of growth for Amazon. It is not a business critical area either and certainly is not perceived as meaningful threat or weakness.
More aggressive investments in this area aren’t justified because it truly doesn’t have a clear effect on the bottom line.
Reputationally, I doubt they care. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of vendors who sell up to 12 millions SKUs to hundreds of millions of customers.
It just makes sense to invest in tools and programs for the hundreds of millions of legit interactions (including reviews) that happen on their platform, than focusing too heavily on those who are not playing by the rules.
Although it would be interesting if there were ever fake reviews on the Amazon branded products. (AFIK there aren't)
If Amazon doesn't want the responsibility of having to make sure stuff on their website is actually legal, then maybe they shouldn't have made letting everyone sell stuff on their site their entire business model.
They want all the profits of being a middleman but without taking any of the associated responsibility. It's a hilariously crap excuse.
On Amazon it's easy: if it's got hundreds of reviews, it's probably mostly fake reviews.
Even for those products if you spend some time you'll find some nuggets of useful information in there.
Contrast with some furniture site I went to some months ago, where there are only like 5 reviews per product and all of them are so completely fake. They assured me the desk was "very stable" which should have tipped me off already ... Later I noticed this "brand" is all over Amazon and each of their products has hundreds of positive reviews.. they are so easy to spot on Amazon... not so much on other sellers where they rebrand the product, have ten times less product info in the description, less photos etc.
Are we worse off or are we just needing to protect people from their inability to scrutinize a new source of bad data?
The internet makes it easier to hide your identity, automate attacks, and reach a large audience at practically no cost.
For example, if I want to influence Skippy peanut butter's review score online I can just leave fake reviews on a few dozen products on a few dozen websites with a few dozen (maybe hundred) fake accounts. Alternatively, I could make up something on social media and hope it goes viral. If I wanted to do the same in the physical world I'd have to pay for some massive marketing campaign which would trace right back to me.
It would be pretty expensive to bribe consumer reports, and it isn't as cost effective to pay someone to give fake recommendations to their friends as it is to pay for fake recommendations on a website. Although some companies do that; it is called multi level marketing.
They're all "different" so they can't be price-compared and the models don't match exactly the model that Consumer Reports reviews.
If a brand is in financial trouble, or just got bought, then buyer beware because the costs are going to be cut and one easy way to increase profits today is reduce quality and increase price.
If a vendor is having trouble, then same thing there where they might slack off on vetting their stock and whatnot.
What I see frequently happening is the market diverges into a high quality, high priced option, and then a veritable mess of quality:price ratio options where the typical person has to rely on the quality being proportional to the price as long as the vendor is reputable and has good management (ie not in financial distress or being bled).
I think whether someone got advice from friends pre-Internet varied by what you were buying. Your friends couldn't tell what type of professional speakers to buy, for example unless they were musicians and then they likely had arbitrary biases.
Before the internet, there were these things called "magazines". These magazines earned money by selling ads.
Advertisers sold products that were reviewed in the magazines they advertised in. And if a magazine's review was unfavorable to an advertisers product, that advertiser could reduce their ad spending.
Also, advertisers could "bribe" reviewers. Probably not with direct cash payments, but it was generally expected that a reviewer would be "gifted" the product reviewed.
So, this has always be a problem.
And many quantitative things including TV ratings involved consumer surveys/polling.
The problem now is that the magazines are generally not as good at covering all the options, many of them have vanished, or have become online only equivalents.
Also, this is in part what the Whole Earth Catalog (later CoEvolution Quarterly and even later Whole Earth Review) was all about, and that's why more than a few people see it as a precursor to the web.
With the rise of Amazon that's all gone.
Although the veneer of quality Amazon have to third party sellers certainly exacerbated the issue, but I think that is close to exhaustion.
With online commerce, and particularly Amazon, the testers are now us, the consumers, and the scale of testing is far wider and deeper, which seems like a good thing in some respects. However, apart from the onus now falling on us, which might or might not be a good thing, there's the problem of getting past the "top rated" items in a given domain, and that might be a really big problem.
Sure, if you were going to a store. Catalogs were popular for many decades (if not a full century or more). I definitely remember my parents ordering from JCPenny and Sears catalogs: Music catalogs (near scams) let you buy music you might not hear. I've personally had catalogs for jewelry making supplies before the internet got adequate and safe enough to order from.
And you realistically just had to hope it was good enough. You probably didn't have reviews at all and just had to hope to trust the company or brand - but lets be real, you didn't always have this. Returns either meant driving to a physical store or spending some time on the phone before going to the post office to return.
I think this places more blame on the consumer than is due. Sure people need to understand how to interpret data, but a lot of this is plain fraud. Fake reviews are fraud. They make a product seem better than it is. Its sorta like false advertising, in a way.
A lot of modern times uses automated systems, eg. maybe amazon top page might require 4+ stars, etc. This would normally be a positive feedback loop (good products get in front of more people, more reviews if good means stronger basis for being in front). With fake reviews, you're disrupting the systems we have for everyone, hurting other brands (if not directly through slander campaigns) and also acting fraudulently.
Before moving to Taiwan (and then China) a lot of the goods were produced quite locally and not outsourced, so it was even possible to have a most so remote relationship to the factory/engineers responsible for a product.
The brand is still a thing, yet a lot of brands are owned by the same mega corporation and effectively produced/assembled in the same outsourced factory with unknown amount of suppliers.
Of course, there were far fewer reviews available, companies still gamed reviewers/magazines but in different ways, and there was sometimes outright fraud around benchmarks, etc.
They’re still quite strong.
(Youtube/Blog) Reviewers get blacklisted by companies by not providing a positive review about a product they were given. As they rely on scooping type style reviews, this means they not only don't get a free product to review, but they can't review it until after it's for sale instead of being able to 'preview' it for people and get more clicks that way.
The "gotta have everything day one (or earlier!) to be cool!" is the most successful piece of meta-marketing imaginable.
They do use affiliate links, so they have incentive to want you to buy _something_, but no incentive to give any particular brand or model a biased review.
When it's seller specific affiliate programs? It's all just spam basically.
The vast majority of publications fund “reviews” in different ways.
Some publications you can pay to have your product “featured” in.
In some others, companies give a reviewer who has a reputation for favorable reviews free products. The unspoken expectation is that the reviews will drive sales and that the free product (and free content) train keeps going.
And yet others have serious conflicts of interest with their supporting advertisers.
In an industry I was in, the trade publication gave the "product of the year" award to whoever bought the most advertisements in the magazine.
(holding up the magazine cover) "I'd like to thank you for creating X magazine's product of the year!"
>he paused for a moment<
"Which is awarded to the highest ad-spend of the magazine for the year."
Absolute comedy, and a wonderfully satirical human being.
They got a guitar or synth that was bad? They would just tell the manufacturer they would rather not say something bad.
Of course, after a while readers started asking questions, so the answer was to review products from companies not advertising in the magazines.
Customers asked "why aren't there any review saying a product is bad", so they started doing that with products whose manufacturers didn't advertise there or didn't give free stuff for review. They'd borrow, or buy a few Danelectro or Behringer pedals for $30 dollars just to make a bad review and "save face" to readers.
Basically they got "token bad products" to save face.
A decade plus ago I worked alongside a team of writers, and they always kept alcohol in their desks. I totally understand why now.
You definitely need a bottle for when you get some terrible product and you know the manufacturer won't like that it won't get reviewed.
Funny enough, the situation is even worse now: with YouTube reviewers, there's no more expectation of neutrality as with professional journalists in the past. So all quality reviews are praising products.
such magazines had massive conflicts of interest and could not be trusted in the first place.
But maybe it's because of FTC rules: fake followers are legally okay, but fake likes and fake comments could be considered a fake review and therefore FTC violation.
Just a couple of days back, something had been bothering me about some new-ish commenters I'd encountered on Reddit, so I did an unscientific check. I realised that about a year or so back, Reddit quietly made it so that when you create an account, they autosuggest a username of the form "Word1-Word2-Number" or "Word1Word2Number", making it hard to tell apart from automated bot/astroturf accounts.
(Try it out -- look at the profiles of any account you encounter that has the above form, and they've been created pretty much always on/after October 2020)
My conspiracy theory is that this was a growth marketing hack to muddy the obvious differences between regular people accounts and bots/spammers.
Or they're making bank on dating site affiliate fees as a side hustle...
I too get those (messages lately) friend requests, and almost always by the time I read the message the account has been deactivated (when it says FB user).
So, overall, I think they're doing a reasonably good job on this particular problem.
Interesting that we have such different experiences, I wonder why that is. (remember that on FB, a 1 in a million event occurs approximately 3k times per day).
Yes. And this is a pattern we are seeing all over - thank you. It's it necessarily good or bad. just more open, democratic, cheaper.
Thats not like a sensible rule of thumb. If we 'democratise' landmines, it would be clearly bad. This is similar
I'll even go so far as to say back when Amazon was getting started their reviews were a lot more reliable as well.
And i think you are talking about the times before NewEgg had 3rd party sellers.
Totally agree. Right now there's a spread from anyone can review anything (yelp, Google reviews) to purchase required to review. What if only 1 out of 20 purchases, selected randomly, were allowed to place a review?
Single person review shops become easier to spot - they are suddenly ordering way more than typical. Returns might skyrocket, which is expensive for everyone involved, however there's now another signal available to spot odd patterns of behavior.
Inclusion of a restocking fee, which is obviously not popular with consumers, is another option which would help make it more expensive to fake reviews.
For instance Aukey has been caught by Amazon, but in my experience their products were pretty good, and they probably played the fake review game mainly due to everyone else playing it, and it became an arms race.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
(since the competitors are sort of forced to use fake reviews)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement
- they can really fix it (e.g. by kicking every fake review mandator) and drown competiting products far below in the search results, leaving "Amazon's choice" ones at the top.
With way fewer reviews it will be harder to argue the ranking results legitimacy.
- they don't fix it, and as you say, get an excuse to kick any random brand trying to stay afloat on their platform.
Either way Amazon wins.
It is a conspiracy theory. Some of them are just true.
And the first, promoted, comment/ratings is from a guy who received the product for free in exchange for a review.
https://www.amazon.fr/AmazonBasics-One-Port-Charger-Tablets-...
Unless your product is so revolutionary or cheap you're gonna need marketing.
Zero trust in any of those reality TV outlets.
I mean there are tons of resources and sites now to fact check the media (whether that's the media themselves like USA Today's fact checking section to non-profits), which is ridiculous if such resources are needed to constantly check what's true or not. Thus, i've tuned out and not a fan of people who plug themselves into their media machine of choice and live/die by it. They do not think for themselves rather their idiot media machine controls them!
Everyone ultimately has to rely on authorities about subjects. From parents to scientist. It's a dilemma, you can't know/research everything your self but you also shouldn't trust blindy everything you get told, so there is no final solution.
The only thing you can do is never stop questioning, falsify everything, don't deem anything above it as sacred. This way, you will collect a shifting world view from all sources.
If you don't engage with your news channels, if you don't question in a meaningful way, if you discredit whole groups of outlets just by virtue, you have surrendered.
Where does the buck stop? Amazon directly benefits from having rosy reviews of The products sold on its platform and they don’t do enough to keep their sellers honest.
> These include, but are not limited to: falsely claiming an endorsement by a third party; misrepresenting whether an endorser is an actual, current, or recent user; using an endorsement to make deceptive performance claims; failing to disclose an unexpected material connection with an endorser; and misrepresenting that the experience of endorsers represents consumers’ typical or ordinary experience.
Is the notice here you just can't advertise the fake reviews? Nothing on actually trying to curtail the fake reviews that show up on commerce sites?
Genuinely curious if commerce sites will need to start policing reviews.
> List of October 2021 Recipients of the FTC’s Notice of Penalty Offenses Concerning Deceptive or Unfair Conduct around Endorsements and Testimonials
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/attachments/penalty-offense...
I was pretty surprised to see a PE firm on the list, though.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...
Businesses do engage with genuine reviewers which makes it even harder to identify real from fake.
Among the long list of issues he rattles off during a conversation are things like fake reviews on their products (the Mafia) as well as them paying teams to plant fake reviews on competitors products to have them tank in ranking.
The other one that was interesting was when an unknown Mafioso paid a team to click on competitors ads on Amazon. The net effect was that they consumed the daily budget by 6 AM and they went through the day without a single sale. In other words, the ROI went to zero on advertising.
Amazon denied it at first. He pressed on and provided details. After six months Amazon admitted they had determined this to be true. They refunded him some advertising money. They never restored the ranking he lost to the criminal.
Even worse, they absolutely refused to share any data with him (and presumably others). In other words, there was no way to seek legal remedies other than, potentially, filing a lawsuit against Amazon. Financial asymmetry aside, the biggest problem is that they keep very tight controls over the data. Which means you will have an almost impossible time proving anything unless you have the financial horsepower to hire an impressive team of attorneys to wage battle against an entire floor of Amazon attorneys. In other words, the little guy gets screwed, has to take it and shut up. Move on.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/faq/consumer-protection/submit-consumer-...
Anymore I don't even worry about such scammers, I just get my money back and move on.
Don't abuse it, they have top notch investigation. When you spend on a credit card, it's not your money they're stealing.
I've used it probably 5 times in 10 years, and never had a problem.
This first happened as I was looking at a Blackmagicdesign product with staggeringly many 5-star reviews and seemingly zero <4-star ones. Sure, some of them are sincere, but what am I supposed to think if I know that even the best product in the world is bound to have poor feedback from bad units, mismatched expectations, courier mishaps, etc.?
Those manufacturer could be innocent; outlier where somehow everyone’s satisfied. Still, it’s an illustration of the erosion of trust in a world where buying fake reviews, followers, etc. has become the norm. Platforms, sellers—pretty much everyone profits from it, just not the end customer. For a business (seller, influencer, entertainer, etc.), it looks like if you don’t do it then your competitor will.
I believe many would give this a second thought if an authority has drawn a clear line saying “that’s illegal”. (I’m sure platforms have it in their ToS, but they are rarely read and the implicit consensus is that they’re, of course, enforced when it benefits the company.) Even if it’s difficult to prosecute each case, a few precedents and the understanding of the illegality could do wonders.
I wish I was joking, but: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/before-you-write-that...
Also leaving anything other than a 5 star review is basically criticizing the company and guaranteed to upset.
This is absolutely rubbish; an e.g. 3/5 should be the baseline for acceptable service, and 4/5 reserved for exceptional quality.
My first experience of this was in rideshare reviews, as a driver. Anything below five stars and it counts as a mark against you, for which eventually you can be deactivated. Then I started seeing this behavior copied everywhere. It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I agree with you on what it should mean, but unfortunately I've got no idea how to convince businesses of this.
Rating the former tends to be 1) personal, 2) having much influence over individual’s livelihood, and 3) much more dependent on my preexisting expectations. If there was something I didn’t like, I try to not give any rating instead of rating poorly unless there was an exceptional issue.
Rating a product, especially by a bigger company, 1) does not necessarily criticise the company itself (I can still admire it while objectively having bad experience with a unit) and 2) has much less influence over company’s overall success (my review is probably a drop in the ocean), and 3) I tend to think of it as more objective than rating a service (compared to a service provided by a human, when evaluating a physical product there’re absurdly fewer variables and you’d be better informed about what you’re supposed to expect based on tech specs).
[0]A personal pet peeve: Dump trucks with 'not liable for broken windshields' on the back. A patently incorrect assertion in every jurisdiction I've come across, written for the express intent of coercing wronged persons out of owed compensation. Yet somehow this doesn't seem to meet the bar for criminal fraud.
Do you have any example where this happened?
Some of my all-time favorite games in that list so I definitely do not agree that those companies should be fined. I've gotten extremely good bang for the buck considering the thousands of hours I've put in.
In reality vast swaths of the world economy are entirely fake, supported with fake reviews, or fake analyst stock calls.
It can be argued that much of the value in the technology space is entirely fake. Look at the current insane multiples.
My point is that all this lying is supercharged due to Fed printing money. And a sizable part of that problem was caused by a near 20 year war with Afghanistan & Iraq -- completely useless wars - as most are. With the world teetering into collapse due to climate change. And most "technologists" more interested in travel to Mars.
The real technology in this world is biological. Way beyond human understanding. So go and make some silly new technology. Get some VC money to pump it up into the land of nonsense valuation. Hurry up, get yours before the whole pile falls back into the gutter.
Yes, Afgan war costed a lot, but people do the math in the wrong way. The same troops would have to be fed and trained at home too, equipment had to be maintained, etc. so this kind of fixed maintenance and training costs should be subtracted from the overall Afghanistan campaign costs.
This filters out bots, fake reviews and low-effort negatives (product is ok, but shipping!)
What's left is man-made reviews that praise what is praiseworthy, and highlight the real drawbacks the products suffer from
Do not sort by "helpful" in any Amazon property (which is default).