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| Amazon is asking for help from social media |
Amazon urges social media companies to curb the spread of fake reviews on its website.
Amazon said in a blog post that more and more players are turning to third-party social media platforms to buy and sell fake product reviews, making the company's solution difficult.
"Some people use social media services themselves," she added. In other cases, they use third-party vendors to perform this activity on their behalf. Attackers attempt this outside of Amazon to reduce our ability to detect activity and relationships between multiple accounts that transmit or benefit from this abuse.
Amazon has accused the social media company of being too slow in detecting fake comment activity on its platform and said response time has improved.
In the first three months of last year, Amazon said it reported more than 300 groups to social media companies and took an average of 45 days to shut down.
In contrast, Amazon reported more than 1,000 groups to social media companies during the same period this year, and it took an average of 5 days to delete a group.
"We are grateful to some of the social media companies for responding faster," she said. However, to solve this problem at scale, social media companies need to invest appropriately in active monitoring to detect fake comments before they are notified of the problem.
Amazon did not mention any social media platform. It might be related to having fake comment groups on Facebook.
Amazon suffers:
A 2018 UK Consumer Protection Agency survey found multiple groups of fake comments on Facebook.
These groups of tens of thousands of members are responsible for overseeing the bogus exam schedule. Users must purchase products and leave reviews in order to receive a refund through PayPal.
Regulators have begun to notice the fake comment program on Facebook. The UK Competition and Markets Authority said last year that Facebook was committed to better identifying, investigating and removing groups of fake comments.
In addition, an investigation by the capital markets regulator led to Facebook cracking down on another 16,000 groups dealing with false and misleading comments.
Facebook previously announced that it would ban fake comments and invest in automated and manual review teams to spot violations.
Amazon has been plagued by false reviews for years. As Amazon's online marketplace generates millions of dollars in revenue from third-party merchants, this problem becomes more acute.
Fake reviews can affect Amazon's relationship with buyers and put buyers at risk of purchasing defective or counterfeit products.
Last year, Amazon deleted 20,000 comments. This came after research found that the UK's top Amazon reviews made money posting fraudulent reviews.
Amazon said it has invested heavily in machine learning tools and human reviewers to root out fake comments and other fraudulent behavior.
Additionally, the company announced last year that it had exposed more than 200 million allegedly fake comments.