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FTC's rule banning fake online reviews goes into effect

(abcnews.go.com)
376 points indus | 1 comments | 22 Oct 24 15:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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burningChrome ◴[22 Oct 24 16:04 UTC] No.41915692[source]▶
>> > 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-...

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munk-a ◴[22 Oct 24 17:29 UTC] No.41916555[source]▶
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.

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fallingknife ◴[22 Oct 24 17:56 UTC] No.41916866[source]▶
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.
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1. crazygringo ◴[22 Oct 24 21:40 UTC] No.41919018[source]▶
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.