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).

This is an important thing to tackle too. Amazon is notorious for allowing shady practices like Sell product A for lots of 5* reviews, then change the product listing to a completely different thing (which may or may not deserve 5) ...

Another aspect is review solicitation. eg: ios games often pop up with their own modal of "Rate us" and if you click 5 it redirects you to app store to make a review, if you click 4 or less it redirects you to a feedback form. They grease the path for positive reviewers.

iOS: That’s 100% against the rules. Much like other dark patterns like forcing a sign up or location access as gating to the rest of the app. Or using notifications for advertising.

Now if only Apple would enforce those (or stop doing them themselves).

oof - the app we work on at my company does all of these..

Did you just have an “Are we the baddies?” moment?