Takes effect in October, finally some good news
Lina Khan is a champion of the people. She’s one of a zillion reasons voting matters.
I’m very interested how this will affect Amazon, and how they will be able to enforce it
Maybe they shouldn’t have 6,000 versions of the same thing under different fake brands sold by fake companies.
Clean that up and the rest becomes a hell of a lot easier.
All the DCRYTJT HDMI cables for a start. Got a couple of bad reviews? Just run your hand over the keyboard at random, there’s your new brand name. They’re now XDCRHJT HDMI cables.
Generic products should just be listed together.
You’d probably enjoy this Ryan George sketch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30
AMZ: Who, us? All our reviews are REAL!
Target and Walmart: Yeah, what they said!
I updated my Firefox browser. Now, when viewing a product on Amazon, Firefox rates the reviews A-F based on whether or not they are reliable.
Fuck Amazon. Never buy their basics bullshit, they steal shit and rebrand it. It’s as unethical as purchasing shit gets.
Edit: Here’s a video! https://youtu.be/HbxWGjQ2szQ
Literally every retailer steals shit and rebrands it; what did you think generic store brands were?
No they literally go to the manufacturer and undercut the other businesses that use them so they can sell the item for cheaper until that business goes under, and then they raise the price. It’s not just a normal stealing of a product.
The ban also forbids marketers from exaggerating their own influence by, for example, paying for bots to inflate their follower count.
I wonder if “followers” includes users and how that will impact Twitter, Reddit, Facebooky, Instagram, TikTok, etc who use stats like active users to drive ad sales.
There’s no way they will be able to enforce this.
Here’s one way to enforce it: the FTC could set up fronts that sell fake reviews. If anyone tries to buy fake reviews, the FTC busts them.
After doing this enough, companies will be suspicious of anyone selling fake reviews. Maybe suspicious enough to not risk buying them. Kind of like how it’s common knowledge that every supposed killer-for-hire is actually an FBI agent waiting to arrest you.
Eventually, nobody want to buy fake reviews. And when nobody wants to pay for them, they will disappear.
That only works for 3rd party vendors.
Amazon doesn’t even bother and just does shady content filtering to make their products always appear first and show real reviews that they think will make you buy the product.
There’s a partial chance they can shadow ban reviews or screw with the total rating too, but I think they entice enough people to produce a passable rating, even if the product is subpar.
Still anything is a start, FTC been making rounds lately.
I don’t think Amazon is the one buying fake reviews, considering it has tried to sue the people who write them. But if they were, then the FTC could go after them too.
Well the ones that call themselves that are probably fbi agents.
The real ones likely don’t take walkins.
Perhaps the value is in having something explicitly written in a book, so that we can actually throw it at them.
They won’t catch all cases, but maybe the fear of slipping and becoming the unlucky company that gets caught and punished will have a positive effect on the industry.
I don’t have a backgrounder in law, this is simply optimistic speculation in response to pessimistic speculation.
To post a review, submit your SSN / verify with a third party.
Cue a whole new identity sales & theft industry!
(I’ve wanted to see some verified reviewer concept for a long time now but it seems dangerous and only half useful.)
The enforcement of this is going to be pretty tough. And the fake reviews by bots will get argued to high hell and back in court. “They aren’t bots, they are real people in click farms”.
Love the direction but I am not holding my breath until we see some actionable change from this.
That’s not how this works. The rule can’t stop you as a private person. You can still post bot reviews.
It will apply to businesses, which don’t have the right to remain silent or against searches. If they suspect a business is breaking the rules, they can subpoena the employees, computers and bank records to check if they are breaking the rule. And if they think the employees would risk jail time for perjury or destruction of evidence to protect their employer, they can just raid the offices and seize the computers.
