When it comes to buying a product, there’s no greater difference maker than a review – especially the really good ones and the really bad ones. No one knows that better than Amazon, and this week, it’s made two major moves to change how reviews impact shoppers.
One move is taking the largest hammer Amazon could find to kill off all the fake review cockroaches once and for all. To date, the company said it’s proactively blocked over 200 million suspected fake reviews from its stores, but now it’s moving its focus to shutting down the emerging and illicit “fake review broker” industry, impacting customer reviews across multiple industry sectors.
This isn’t an easy peasy task, either. These brokers approach consumers directly through websites, social media channels, and encrypted messaging services, sometimes masquerading as a legit business, soliciting people to write fake reviews in exchange for money, free products, or other incentives.
And we’re not talking about a few dozen people at a building in Bombay, either. Amazon says these networks have hundreds of employees worldwide doing their deed. That factor alone makes it doubly tough to get to and eradicate an entire operation.
Nonetheless, the company is having success with its efforts. Last year, Amazon took legal action against over 90 bad actors around the world who facilitated fake reviews, and it sued more than 10,000 Facebook group administrators that attempted to put fake reviews in its stores in exchange for money or free products.
As of the end of May, Amazon had already surpassed that number, taking legal action against 94 bad actors in the U.S., China, and Europe. If things keep happening at that rate, the company could haul 200 more into court by the end of 2023.
The company needs some peer pressure to make this thing completely go away, however. Amazon reported more than 23,000 abusive social media groups, with over 46 million members and followers, that facilitated fake reviews on social media sites.
Unfortunately, not every company moves as quickly as Amazon can and it has reached out to those companies to offer and help improve their detection methods so they can disrupt fake review networks and address the problem at scale. Keep your fingers crossed.
In the meantime, Amazon is using AI to help out
While the Amazon law enforcement squad is out looking for fake review networks, the other side of the review department is testing artificial intelligence (AI) to see how it can cut down all the time customers take leafing through reviews trying to decide whether a product is worth its salt or not.
Its use of AI is aimed at rounding up customer feedback about products on the site, trying to get the most realistic review summary possible and putting that information front and center.
In one example reported by CNN, a summation of 4,000-plus reviews for Apple’s third-generation AirPods said that the products “have received positive feedback from customers regarding their sound quality and battery life.” But, to be perfectly fair, it also summed up the concerns of those who bought the headphones, adding “mixed opinions were also expressed about the performance, durability, fit, comfort, and value of the headphones.”
CNBC gave an example of how a listing for a toy called “Magic Mixies” cauldron played out on the mobile version of Amazon, summarizing the 16,564 ratings and reviews as positive feedback around its “fun factor, appearance, value, performance, quality, charging, and leakage.”
“We are significantly investing in generative AI across all of our businesses,” Amazon said in a statement to CNN.
AI isn’t perfect, yet, and using it to crunch thousands of reviews down to a sentence or two is requiring Amazon to get inside AI’s thinking and re-educate the AI engine when it makes a mistake. For example in the AirPods review, the summation says, “all customers who mentioned stability had a negative opinion about it.”
“Given that generative AI is based on probability, mistakes are possible … and summaries may not be an accurate reflection of customer reviews,” said Reece Hayden, a senior analyst at ABI Research. “The possibility of hallucinations will be a worry for customers and merchants.”