Amazon attacks social-media firms over its fake-review problem, saying they need to spend more money rooting out phoney-review groups on their platforms

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

AP Photo/Charles Krupa

• Amazon published a blog post about fake reviews on Wednesday.
• It said "bad actors" were increasingly soliciting fake reviews on social-media platforms.
• Amazon said social media companies needed to invest more in tools to root out this behavior.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

Amazon said in a blog post on Wednesday that its fight against fake reviews was hampered by sluggish social media companies.

Amazon said its systems to detect and block fake reviews stopped most of them from ever appearing - and that "bad actors" were therefore increasingly looking outside of Amazon's range, including on social-media sites, to solicit fake product reviews.

In the first three months of 2020, when Amazon alerted social-media platforms about fake-review groups, they were taking "a median time of 45 days to shut down those groups from using their service to perpetrate abuse," Amazon said.

This had sped up in 2021, Amazon said: In the first three months of 2021 it reported 1,000 groups to social media companies, which took on average five days to shut them down.

But social media companies still needed to invest more in detecting fake reviews, it said.

"While we appreciate that some social media companies have become much faster at responding, to address this problem at scale, it is imperative for social media companies to invest adequately in proactive controls to detect and enforce fake reviews ahead of our reporting the issue to them," Amazon said.

It was "clear that this is an industry-wide battle, and we need to work together to make faster progress," Amazon said - while acknowledging that its own detection systems weren't "perfect."

Read more: Big firms are popping up to buy third-party Amazon sellers, who made up more than half of the retail giant's $386 billion in net sales in 2020. Here are the biggest players in this fast-growing trend.

Amazon did not name any social-media companies in particular.

A Facebook spokesperson said that "fraudulent and deceptive activity is not allowed on our platforms, including offering or trading fake reviews. Our safety and security teams are continually working to help prevent these practices."

Twitter declined to comment.

Social media isn't the only place where people can buy fake Amazon reviews: UK consumer watchdog Which found a number of websites selling bundles of reviews for as much as $11,000 in February.

Amazon did not give any particular reason why it was publishing its blog, but Insider tech correspondent Rob Price tweeted that a UK newspaper was due to publish an investigation into fake reviews on Amazon this Friday.

Read the original article on Business Insider

from Business Insider https://ift.tt/3q18WH7