The full title/subtitle of the article is: Those 10,000 5-star reviews are fake. Now they’ll also be illegal. The FTC has proposed new rules that clarify what is and isn’t a deceptive online review — and would give it the power to fine $50,000 for each fake.

$50,000 is much greater than $50 :)

30-40%? Please. Almost every single product on Amazon with more than 100 reviews has at least 70-80% of them sounding exactly the same. FakeSpot isn’t even that good and yet it can still tell you at least that amount are fishy if not much higher.

Wait til we get gen AI-based reviews. It will literally become indistinguishable unless there is some sort of purchase verification, and even then, what’s to stop sellers from using services to spoof reviews by purchasing their products?

On one hand, I’d like to incentivize Amazon to bang on fakes. And I’m sure that Amazon can tell that some are fakes.

On the other hand, I’m also sure that Amazon cannot tell that some are fakes. Exposing them to liability there seems questionable.

One way Amazon could deal with this is to just ban consumer reviews. That may not be as crazy as it sounds – the way people used to get product information was to go to dedicated reviewers, places like Consumer Reports (which is still around but basically a shell of its former self) or domain-specific places that do reviews of products.

That’s got some arguments in favor. You can still get biased or paid-off reviewers with that model, but the reputation system there has the consumer making the call. It may have more-knowledgeable reviewers. It decouples the reviewer from the vendor, which forces the vendors to be more-competitive – I don’t need to go to Amazon to get review information, then to another vendor to actually buy if I don’t want to buy from Amazon.

But it’s also typically going to cost something – one historically paid for access to reviews. Free third-party review sites and reviewers – where often bias was a major problem, as in a product’s manufacturer found a way to influence them – had also swamped dedicated reviewing organizations. It may be slower for reviews for new entrants to a market to have reviews show up. Getting access to reviews may be less-convenient than looking at reviews directly on the vendor’s site.