Amazon sues admins from 10,000 Facebook groups over fake reviews
If 10,000 Facebook groups sounds like a lot, it's apparently the sum total of groups Amazon has reported to Facebook since 2020. The company notes that past legal action it's taken has been effective and "shut down multiple major review brokers," and yet here we are. They've been suing people for this stuff since all the way back in 2015.
The company named one group, "Amazon Product Review," which boasted more than 40,000 members until Facebook removed it earlier in 2022. That one evaded detection through the time-honored, AI-eluding strategy of swapping a few letters around in phrases that would get it busted.
The monitoring might be continuous but it's clear that thousands and thousands of illegitimate reviews push products across the online retailer's massive digital storefront every day, all around the world. And regulators are taking notice - something that's bound to light a little fire under everyone's favorite online shopping monolith.
Amazon has been plagued with reviews that artificially boost product ratings for years. A Washington Post investigation back in 2018 found that obviously fake reviews dominated some product categories, including bluetooth headphones and health supplements.
Amazon acknowledged the scope of the problem in a blog post last year. "Due to our continued improvements in detection of fake reviews and connections between bad-actor buying and selling accounts, we have seen an increasing trend of bad actors attempting to solicit fake reviews outside Amazon, particularly via social media services," the company wrote.
Amazon said that it reported more than 1,000 review-selling groups to social media platforms in the first quarter of 2021 - up threefold from the same period the prior year. Whether that speaks to the prevalence of fake reviews or the online retailer taking the issue more seriously isn't clear, but the company was keen to pass the blame onto social media companies for their lax enforcement of those groups when they violate platform rules.
Ultimately, fake reviews aren't the worst kind of misleading content that internet companies are failing to eradicate. But they are another example of how, when you have a massive enough cash-printing (or cash-burning) internet machine, systemic problems can spiral out of control while you were head down making the line go up. And sometimes those problems incentivize all kinds of bad or weird stuff. In this case: A small industry of people cashing in on making bad products look good - and once that's all in motion, it's difficult to untangle the mess the big money machine made.
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