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).

Well step 3 is the part they just made illegal. If you are OK with breaking the law, nothing is going to stop you until you get caught and fined. Presumably the getting caught and fined part will be enough deterrent.

what qualifies a review as fake? If I write it, it's a review isn't it? The whole thing is subjective. Plenty of people love products I can't stand

And how do they even audit it? Do they require only users who verifiably used/purchased the product to submit reviews? Do they require the reviewer to actually use the product? for sufficient amount of time so that the review is more than just "first impression"? So many loopholes, this won't change anything except perhaps a few big marketplaces but it's doubtful they will be able to police it

That's actually a really good point. I can review a can opener in a few minutes. Either it opens the can or it doesn't. How would I ever review something like a Ford F-350? I don't even have a trailer heavy enough to test the towing capacity.

Well, that's a bad example ... The can opener I had for the first 50 years of my life left a dangerous crazy sharp metal edge around the opening which I cut myself on more than once. The Oxo can opener I've had for the last 10 years rolls the edge as it cuts and removes the entire top of the can; what's left is extremely safe, at least by comparison with the old style.

Then again, when I was much younger, I had a backpacking can opener that was useful when hiking in places where sometimes buying canned foods made sense. It was about as large as a very large postage stamp, and crazy good for the size and weight. I wouldn't want to use it at home (much), but it was awesome when I had to carry it around.

So, even for can openers, the story can be complicated.

Also, assuming that the primary purpose of an F350 is towing is ... interesting. Lots and lots of them here in rural NM (as much as anyway, anyway), and they are rarely towing anything.

Not debating the practicality here, but even if you need your truck to do something only once in the entirety of your ownership, it needs to be capable of this all the time. Towing, crawling, etc.

I disagree. I've never had a vehicle that does 100% of whatever I'd want a vehicle to do. At some point we need to make tradeoffs and accept that we'll either have limitations or need to solve some problems in a different way.

Letting something that is 1% of operating hours for a device drive requirements strongly is often a mistake. With some obvious exceptions because e.g. I cannot choose when I am going to engage in maximum braking and defer it to a different vehicle.

i am sorry but i do not understand.

if a car advertises that towing is a feature, and that the truck should be dependable in its features (which is literally Ford branding), and then towing only worked.. one time (barring extenuating circumstances) -- it most definitely is a product which failed to deliver.

a lemon, so to speak.