FTC's rule banning fake online reviews goes into effect

>> > the rule bans reviews and testimonials attributed to people who don’t exist or are generated by artificial intelligence, people who don’t have experience with the business or product/services, or misrepresent their experience.

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-...

Of course they know. One thing at a time.

Especially now that literally anything the FTC does could be struck down by a federal judge at any time, unless it is explicitly written out or delegated legislation.

Actually that's covered by the rule.

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.

"generated by artificial intelligence" ? So if I write "this product sucks" for a review and I use Bing or some other source to rewrite this to "this product's quality does not live up to the manufacturer's claim" based on my input does that make it a crime?

I hope this is actively enforced with real teeth very soon. I 1-star fake products and call them out in reviews resulting in the devious vendor somehow being able to send me a postcard to my real physical address offering money for 5 stars. The sham vendor also spam my email weekly. Amazon appears to actively support this process. It needed to be curtailed decades ago.

I read it as "attributed to people who ... are generated by artificial intelligence.'

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.

I think the bigger issue Amazon will face is that you can edit items in a big way... it's not like just clarifying "Multi-socket extension cord" to "Three socket extension cord" but swapping out products wholesale once you've built up a clout of good reviews on it.

Honestly - Amazon really needs some serious lawsuits to force it to stop being such a bad actor in the online retail space.

This is an extremely hard problem to solve. What degree of change makes it a different product? And that doesn't even touch the problem that products can look identical on the outside and use cheap crap on the inside. Amazon is not a bad actor here. They have every incentive to solve this problem. But they won't, not because they don't try, but because this is a problem as old as commerce.

It's a hard problem for a computer to solve - a computer shouldn't be used to solve it... computers were never used to solve it before Amazon because it's clearly a hard problem (and it scales really well with human labor).

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.

This is 100% the problem.

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.

>> The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives.

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.

Users need more ability to intelligently contribute. I just hit this yesterday. 2-star review that was actually entirely about the third party that shipped expired stock, not about the product itself. All I could do is flag the review as "other", no text. (As it was the only review I also reported it under the something wrong with the product which does allow text.) And specifically give us "wrong version", "wrong product" and "seller, not product" flags. And don't reject my review that clearly called out that this isn't the real thing. I didn't simply get a counterfeit, the whole listing was counterfeit.

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.

Christ almighty you people are exhausting.

The FTC can force Amazon to do more about it. Just proving they are trying would be a big help.

Walmart shuffles parts the other way - the barcode will change every year or so or whatever so they can be sure to clearance out the old.

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.

Amazon is currently providing a LLM-generated summary of these faked customer reviews. To abide by the FTC ruling, Amazon would now have to prove that all of their training data is legitimate customer reviews. Do you think they will actually do that?

If the FTC wants to they can. The government as a lot more power than Amazon, the only question is will they use it.

The people I've met that leave reviews for free product aren't required to leave any "particular sentiment". They just rely on tacit laws of reciprocity.

I've gotten lots of offers of discounts in exchange for a review.

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.

It's not hard at all, it just needs moderation. Amazon is absolutely the bad actor because they allow sellers to edit their listings to utterly unrelated items, rather than having moderators reject those changes. It's not hard to prevent a cheap kitchen utensil with 2,000 positive reviews from being edited into an expensive drone.

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.