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-...

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.