FTC's rule banning fake online reviews goes into effect

Does the regulation say anything about deceptively moderating reviews? e.g. deleting all the low star reviews?

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/...

How does this stop one of the most common practices?

* 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).

Im curious about the opposite practice, sharing reviews across several SKUs. I basically stopped looking at reviews because they were unrelated to the one I was buying.

I get that some products have configurations, like color and size, but often times wildly different products are grouped together.

On Amazon you can filter by the current configuration on the review page (at least on desktop).