Amazon is Blaming Social Media For Perpetuating Fake Review Abuse

[engine]

Amazon has said it blames social media for failing to react quick enough to stop groups set up to organise and perpetuate fake reviews.

[theguardian.com...]

There's no doubt these fake review are a real pain, but i'm now considerably more wary when reading the reviews and accepting them as being accurate. I was caught out quite a few years back. Having dug around the product reviews I realised that when someone put up an objective review, it was rapidly followed by a few five-star, fantastic product reviews, pushing down the real reviews. I tested it myself (the product really was a waste of the world's resources) and put up a factual review. Within a couple of hours, miraculously, several glowing reviews pushed my truthful review off the new reviews.
One bitten, twice shy.

Amazon needs to get a grip.

[iamlost]

Ah yes.
The ‘some other dude did it’ defence.

[tangor]

It's always the fault of social media ... yeah, that's the ticket!

[Kendo]

It doesn't take much to ruin reputation by blasting reviews.

[lucy24]

But, but, splutter, but how is that social media’s fault? It's not as if some casual bystander happens to see a Facebook post and is spontaneously inspired to write a rave review for a product they've never heard of from a vendor they have no relationship with. Social media just happens to be the current contact mechanism for people who are already on your payroll and who would otherwise be reached by phone, or email, or a restricted-access website, or ... Heck, in decades past there would have been closely analogous scams run via U.S. mail.

[engine]

Taking a balanced view, Amazon must do better, but, equally, if it has found organised groups are using social media, which is out of Amazon's control, what else is it to do.

Have you ever tried to get support from social media companies? In my experience, it's near impossible.

[martinibuster]

There are private Facebook groups that are created to facilitate fake Amazon reviews [theverge.com]. Sellers promise to pay "reviewers" for reviews and they go in and leave fake reviews.

Within the past year Google removed "top reviewers" who had reviewed an enormous amount of products and last month a database of almost a quarter million fake reviewers [zdnet.com] was exposed.

Facebook is indeed being used to facilitate an underground fake review economy.

I agree that Amazon needs to throw more resources into cleaning up fake reviews because ultimately it's an Amazon problem, not Facebook. Yet Facebook should not allow their platform to be used for possibly illegal schemes (FTC).