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Amazon admits it has a fake review problem, but is doing its best to bring the blame in a new message detail of the issue. After years of reports of the online retail giant being inundated with counterfeit products and fake or cultured reviews, the company wants to look like it’s finally gaining a foothold, but no new efforts or rules are being discussed, it’s others to stand up for their work to keep Amazon safe.
Amazon reviews have become notoriously unreliable as indicators of quality, as the store has voluntarily indulged in counterfeits, AliExpress resellers, and promotion of the company’s internal brands (developed with the benefit of seller data). Multiple reports have made organized attempts to spam the store with pointless five-star reviews in exchange for free products or cash. I myself have received such offers, or sellers who promise payment for increasing a star rating.
After the required preliminary palate about “obsessed with satisfying customers” and all, Amazon explains that like all major tech giants, it uses automated systems to check ratings before going up. The company has always been hesitant about the actual numbers, but in this post it drops a whopper: “In 2020, we stopped over 200 million suspected fake reviews before they were ever seen by a customer.”
200 million is a lot any way you look at it, but it really is a lot when you consider that Amazon told CNBC that same year that it “analyzes”[s] over 10 million review submissions per week,” which equates to somewhere north of the 520 million submissions per year. These two figures provided by Amazon suggest that at least a third of all submitted reviews are rejected as fake.
Hard numbers on Amazon’s overall ratings are hard to come by. In conversation with BuzzFeedAmazon list analysis site Tommy Noonan of ReviewMeta estimated that Amazon had about 250 million reviews in 2020 (of which he calculated about 9% to be “unnatural”). But if more than 500 million were submitted in 2020 and about 200 million of them were fake, that indicates a much larger total. I’ve asked Amazon for more accurate information on this and will update the post if I hear anything, but the company doesn’t generally communicate these numbers.
Groups that organize on social media numbering in the tens of thousands have repeatedly been identified as major contributors to the fake review ecosystem. Amazon writes that it reported 300 such groups to the platforms they host in the first quarter of 2020, and more than 1,000 in the same period in 2021. Shutdown times have increased, but it’s hard to think of this increase as anything other than a thriving business model and certainly not something that is being wiped out.
“It is imperative for social media companies to invest appropriately in proactive controls to detect and enforce false reviews before reporting the issue to them,” Amazon said. Social media companies are indeed being pressured from multiple directions to take more responsibility for what users do on their platforms, but they are making the same noises as Amazon: “we are doing what we can” (and, it remains unspoken, clearly it is not enough).
“We need coordinated help from consumer protection regulators around the world,” Amazon writes. But the company lobbied vigorously and successfully against the INFORM act, which would have helped identify ill-intentioned sellers and add transparency to online marketplaces (strangely, Amazon has taken some of the actions it is independent against). And that rule is suspiciously absent if it is Amazon against which consumers must be protected.
It is also critical that we hold bad actors and the service providers who give them false ratings accountable for their activities. But while lawsuits and partnerships with law enforcement are part of that, the call to “work together” rings hollow once again when Amazon itself is where the activity takes place and the company has complete control over that ecosystem. While it has banned some major players from the store, countless others are breaking the rules with impunity.
Nowhere in the post does Amazon describe any new steps it will take to deter these bad actors or tackle the ubiquitous play of the system it sets the rules for. It will “continue to improve” its detection tools, “streamline processes” for partnerships and “work hard” to hold scammers accountable. In other words, it will continue to do exactly what it has been doing all along, which put it in this position in the first place.
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