If you are fed up with fake online reviews, you can now officially report them to the FTC.
The Federal Trade Commission began enforcing rules that ban companies from buying or selling reviews or having employees write fake reviews. FTC Chair Lina Khan invited consumers to flag reviews they believe to be fake–including AI-generated and scam testimonials.
As of today, @FTC‘s final rule banning fake online reviews and testimonials has come into effect.
If you encounter any of these prohibited practices, you can report them to @FTC at: https://t.co/k0O6juZImU https://t.co/I2Rf0b9xTH pic.twitter.com/60qp2cRJMU
— Lina Khan (@linakhanFTC) October 21, 2024
The new FTC rules promise to help stop the flood of fake reviews popping up on e-commerce sites and social media. The FTC can now prosecute suspected offenders involved in these six types of activities:
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Writing and posting fake consumer reviews or false celebrity testimonials.
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Buying or selling positive/negative reviews.
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Failing to disclose that the review came from a company insider involved in the product.
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Creating a company-controlled review website that pretends to offer independent reviews.
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Using various threats or means to prevent or remove a negative review.
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Selling or purchasing fake indicators of social media influence, such as followers or views.
It also means consumers can report offending reviews, but there are still questions about whether the FTC can enforce the new rules at the scale needed to take down billions of fake reviews across the internet. It’s also unclear if it will apply to reviews posted prior to the new rule. The FTC says it plans to enforce the new rules by suing alleged offenders. Violators could face a maximum civil penalty of $51,744 per violation, but the courts would decide the final penalty.
Tools to Spot Fake Reviews
It’s getting harder to spot fake reviews created by a seller or someone paid by them. The online shopping boom, combined with the competition to rank high on sites like Amazon has caused a boom to this dark side of the e-commerce business. Over the last few years, the spotlight on fake reviews has only continued to grow, after it was discovered that over 200,000 people were involved in a fake reviews scheme with third-party Amazon vendors. The growth of AI has made it even more difficult to determine what’s real. Amazon now offers tools to sellers that generate product descriptions and create listings and helps shoppers ask questions or compare products.
To spot fake reviews, look for those that are overly positive or negative without offering enough detail. Very brief five-star and one-star reviews, particularly if they’re posted on the same day, may also denote suspicious activity. To deter fake reviews, Amazon added a Verified Purchase label to indicate the review was by someone who actually purchased the product. However, where there’s a will, there’s a way to scam the system, and sellers have started compensating buyers for positive reviews. While the new FTC rules will hopefully make sites like Amazon more accountable to taking down fake reviews, here are a few tools you can use to help spot them.
Fakespot
Fakespot rates how reliable products and reviews are on Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Sephora, Shopify, and Walmart. It looks at reviews and reviewers, analyzes the language used, previous reviews, and users’ purchase history to determine their ratings.
In addition to being able to enter in a product’s URL on their website, Fakespot has a Chrome extension that analyzes product pages with the push of a button, as well as access seller ratings and other benefits. Fakespot also has apps for iOS and Android, which can analyze reviews from your phone.
ReviewMeta
Paste an Amazon product URL into ReviewMeta, and it will remove reviews it thinks are unreliable. Then, it will replace Amazon’s aggregate review rating with its own adjusted rating. It provides a report card that evaluates the reviews and provides detailed breakdowns about the factors that contribute to the adjusted rating.
On-site assessments are preliminary reports, and you can’t edit the adjusted rating. Also, not all product reviews are included, but you can request an analysis of the product.
You can also add the browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, or Edge to quickly analyze an Amazon product page. There’s also an iOS app and a custom bookmarklet.
TheReviewIndex
TheReviewIndex is a search tool focused on tech product ratings on Amazon, but it can help determine if a product’s rating has been bumped up by fake reviews. Plug the URL into the site and it will break the product out into different categories based on the words it parsed from reviews. It will also run a spam test to see if the reviews are authentic, with a rating provided.
In addition to the product rating, it gives you snippets of reviews from both positive and negative review categories and lets you view the factors that go into their spam testing.
Spot AI-Generated Text
Automation and AI tools can be used to create millions of reviews a day by writing like humans. How can you tell the difference between AI and a human? To check to see if AI wrote the review, you can run it through a system that promises to identify AI-generated text.