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/...
* 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).
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.
Yes! As a heavy, long-time Amazon user I hate this and have to believe Amazon is knowingly complicit either in continuing to enable this shady vendor behavior or conveniently looking the other way. Of course, shady vendors will game whatever measures Amazon might take to prevent such tricks but it's so prevalent I don't think Amazon seriously invests in detection/prevention of 'rating swapping' on an ongoing basis anymore.
Another super annoying thing Amazon enables is allowing sellers to list multiple different products (SKUs) on the same listing. This was originally intended for things like different colors or sizes of the same product but it is frequently abused by vendors to bundle quite different products into one listing and thus sharing one rating.
Before they were the overwhelming market leader, Amazon used to care about and invest in the accuracy and credibility of product reviews and ratings. About 10 years ago they seemed to stop putting as much effort toward this and certainly in the past five years they don't seem to care if vendors subvert the system. I understand bad behavior can never be 100% prevented but Amazon could police and penalize it far more effectively. For example, requiring sellers above a certain volume of sales and listings to have increasingly stringent "real ID" type verification, making it harder (or at least more costly) to just relist under a new identity when caught cheating.