How Many Fake Amazon Reviews to Get Banned

Amazon deflects responsibility on fake reviews but admits 200M were blocked last year

Amazon admits it has a fake review problem, but does its best to spread the blame around in a new post detailing the effect. After numerous reports for years that the online retail behemothic is overrun with knock-off products and faked or farmed reviews, the visitor aims to look as if information technology is finally putting its pes down, but no new efforts or rules are discussed — rather, it is others that need to stride upwardly their work to go on Amazon safe.

Amazon reviews have become notoriously unreliable equally indicators of quality as the store has given itself over willingly to counterfeits, AliExpress resellers and promotion of the company's internal brands (adult with the benefit of seller data). Multiple reports take found organized efforts to spam the shop with meaningless five-star reviews in exchange for free products or cash. I take myself received such offers, or sellers promising payment for raising a star rating.

After the requisite preliminary palaver nearly being "obsessed with delighting customers" and all that, Amazon explains that information technology, like all big tech giants, uses automatic systems to vet reviews earlier they become upwards. The company has e'er been chary about the actual numbers, just in this mail it drops a whopper: "In 2020, nosotros stopped more than 200 1000000 suspected fake reviews before they were ever seen by a customer."

200 million is a lot no thing how you await at it, but it'southward really a lot when yous consider that Amazon told CNBC that same year that it "analyze[s] over ten one thousand thousand review submissions weekly," which adds up to somewhere north of 520 one thousand thousand submissions yearly. These ii Amazon-provided numbers suggest that a third of all reviews submitted, at a minimum, are rejected as fake.

Hard numbers on Amazon's total reviews are hard to come by. Speaking to BuzzFeed, Amazon listing analysis site ReviewMeta's Tommy Noonan estimated that in 2020 Amazon hosted around 250 one thousand thousand reviews (of which, incidentally, he calculated about 9% were "unnatural"). Merely if over 500 million were submitted in 2020 and near 200 1000000 of those were fake, that indicates a far larger total. I've asked Amazon for more precise information on this, and will update the mail service if I hear dorsum, but the company is not communicative about these numbers in general.

Groups organizing on social media numbering in the tens of thousands accept been repeatedly pointed out as major contributors to the faux review ecosystem. Amazon writes that in the first quarter of 2020, it reported 300 such groups to the platforms hosting them, and the aforementioned menstruum in 2021 information technology reported over 1,000. Takedown times accept increased, just information technology'south difficult to take this increase equally annihilation other than a thriving concern model — certainly not something in the process of being stamped out.

"It is imperative for social media companies to invest fairly in proactive controls to find and enforce simulated reviews ahead of our reporting the issue to them," Amazon declares. Indeed social media companies are beingness pressed from multiple directions to take more than responsibility for what users do on their platforms, but they make the same noises Amazon does: "nosotros're doing what we tin," (and, it is left unsaid, clearly it's not enough).

"Nosotros demand coordinated help from consumer protection regulators effectually the world," Amazon writes. But the company lobbied forcefully and successfully confronting the INFORM act, which would have helped place sellers with bad intent and add together transparency to online marketplaces (strangely, Amazon has taken some of the actions it objects to independently). And that line is suspiciously absent-minded when it is Amazon that consumers need to be protected against.

"It is also disquisitional that nosotros hold bad actors—and the service providers that provide them with simulated reviews—accountable for their activity," the postal service continues. But while lawsuits and partnerships with police force enforcement are part of that, over again the phone call to "work together" rings hollow when Amazon itself is where the activeness occurs and the visitor is in complete control of that ecosystem. Though it has banned some major players from the store, innumerable others flout the rules with impunity.

Nowhere in the post does Amazon detail any new steps it will accept to deter these bad actors or crevice downward on the pervasive gaming of the arrangement for which it sets the rules. It will "continue to enhance" its detection tools, "streamline processes" for partnerships, and "work hard" at keeping scammers accountable. In other words, it will keep doing exactly what it has been doing this whole fourth dimension — which is what put it in this position in the starting time place.

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Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/16/amazon-deflects-responsibility-on-fake-reviews-but-admits-200m-were-blocked-last-year/

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