Amazon Blames Social Media Sites For Enabling Fake Review Authors

Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN is calling on social media platforms to help prevent fake reviews on its e-commerce site, threatening to hold them "accountable" if they continue to provide a forum for the phony reviewers.

What Happened: In a post on the company’s corporate blog carrying the byline “Written by Amazon Staff,” the company stated it “stopped more than 200 million suspected fake reviews before they were ever seen by a customer” last year, with nearly all of these action “proactive detection.”

The company claimed it was “relentless in protecting our store and will take action to stop fake reviews regardless of the size or location of those who attempt this abuse.” It also said it was aware of “an increasing trend of bad actors attempting to solicit fake reviews outside Amazon, particularly via social media services.”

Amazon claimed that when it alerted social media platforms about fake review groups on their sites during the first three months of 2020, the platforms took “a median time of 45 days to shut down those groups from using their service to perpetrate abuse.” Over the same period in 2021, however, the social media platforms only took five days to shut down those groups.

The blog post did not specifically cite any of the social media platforms by name, nor did it offer any evidence or case studies on how the authors of fake Amazon reviews are using Twitter TWTR, Facebook FB or the other social media sites to enable their activities.

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What's Next: The blog post identified this issue as an “industry-wide battle” and vowed to continue its fight against the individuals writing the fake reviews and the platforms that give them a home.

“It is also critical that we hold bad actors – and the service providers that provide them with fake reviews – accountable for their activity,” the Amazon blog post said, adding it needed “social media companies whose services are being used to facilitate fake reviews to proactively invest in fraud and fake review controls, partner with us to stop these bad actors, and help consumers shop with confidence.”

AMZN Price Action: At last check, Amazon was trading at $3,461.28, closer to its 52-week high of $3,554 than to its 52-week low of $2,630.08.

(Image by athree23 / Pixabay.)