Isabelle Lee wrote an article for Bloomberg titled Amazon Fake Reviews Reach Holiday Season Levels During Pandemic.
« About 42% of 720 million Amazon reviews assessed by the monitoring service Fakespot Inc. from March through September were unreliable, up from about 36% for the same period last year. »
« Bogus reviews have plagued Amazon and other online marketplaces for years, despite the companies’ efforts to purge them. The perpetrators, sometimes paid, either hype the virtues of a product or sabotage it to tank sales. Various automated services have emerged to help shoppers assess whether the reviews they’re reading are real. »
« “Companies like Fakespot and ReviewMeta that claim to ‘check’ reviews cannot concretely determine the authenticity of a review, as they do not have access to Amazon’s propriety data such as reviewer, seller and product history,” an Amazon spokeswoman said in an email. »
« One of the reviewers claimed to have assessed nine products that day and 1,348 in total. To Fakespot, that was a classic tell. “No one has time to review that many products ever,” [Fakespot founder and Chief Executive Officer Saoud Khalifah] said. “These are obviously fake.” He said that though he believes Amazon conducted a purge in September, the number of unreliable reviews found by Fakespot remained the highest the company has recorded. »
« “There are so many things going on in Amazon,” [ReviewMeta founder Tommy Noonan] says. “There are so many little loopholes that can affect the fluctuations we see.” »
Articles of Interest 