Nearly two years after finding a booming market in Amazon’s fake review industry on Facebook, where distributors presented loose products in exchange for five-star reviews, our most recent survey that Facebook still has a persistent challenge on its platform.
But in our most recent investigation, we discovered seamlessly evidence that dozens of Facebook teams continued to exchange criticism. We analyzed the activity of 16 of them and discovered:
eBay turns out to have taken strong action against classified ads promoting five-star reviews; we found no evidence that distributors exchanged reviews on the platform.
It’s incredibly easy to locate dozens of suspicious computers in minutes on Facebook. We search for “Amazon Reviews” and then analyze the 25 most productive results.
Despite Facebook’s agreement to take action on commercial reviews on the platform, 16 of the main teams obviously exchanged incentives. In many cases, dealers brausly sought to make in exchange for refunds or commissions.
These equipment is still a hotbed of activity. One had more than 36,000 members, while several others had more than 20,000 members. In total, there were more than 200,000 members in the 16 teams.
In the maximum active group, which has 27,000 members, there had been 6,406 messages in a day. Combined with the other groups, there were approximately 16,000 messages that day. For one month, the number of positions was at least 82,000.
Facebook is committed to success in an agreement with the CMA to “introduce more physically powerful systems to trip and remove this content,” and the emergence of “prohibited words” on teams advised vendors to adopt new tactics to verify and avoid systems. to have on the social media platform. Implemented.
But we know that Facebook’s movements so far don’t go far enough and fail to stem the wave of complaints that is flooding their platform. Did it take one that? a few minutes and an undeniable search in the “Amazon review” to realize those computers, an action that may have been carried out smoothly through Facebook.
The difference the incentive can make in the visibility of a product list on Amazon is clear. Since we started researching review sharing on Facebook, we’ve discovered 36 teams with a general club of over half a million people. This means that thousands of incentive notices, designed to deceive buyers, would possibly have come to Amazon.
It would possibly be simple to detect the most obviously suspicious reviews, such as those that are too effusive, but ratings and reviews also feed reliable recommendations, potentially helping distributors scale in the rankings.
In a Facebook group, we discovered an indexed Enacfire Bluetooth speaker with the promise of a refund after the review. On Amazon, the same product, which was not sold directly through Enacfire, had a whopping 2558 ratings and a visitor rating of 4.9 out of 5. It also gave the impression of being the most productive result when searching for “Bluetooth speakers”, which had returned more than 30,000 ads, and the blue edition of the speaker gave the impression of being approved through Amazon’s Choice.
This is the only product we discovered that had the coveted approval of Amazon Choice. Two pieces of Backture camping equipment posted through an agent of the Facebook organization, an inflatable camping mat and an inflatable living room chair were also classified as Amazon’s Choice.
“When we mark a product as Amazon’s choice, we proactively incorporate a number of points designed to protect consumers from those rule violations. When we identified a product that would possibly not meet our constant bar for the products we advertised for consumers, we removed the badge. »
What? recognizes that Facebook may face some demanding technical situations to address this problem, however, we expected the online platform to progress much more six months after its commitment to the CMA.
Facebook will need to show now that it takes the factor seriously and demonstrate what else it will do to fulfill its commitment to the regulator.
The CMA will also need to be careful to keep an eye on Facebook, defining its next steps if the site fails to take strong action against the challenge on its platform.
“We will thoroughly review these disturbing findings and send them urgently to Facebook.”
What? it also believes that the continued use of Facebook to effectively exchange false and misleading reviews is further proof that online platforms want to be more guilty about the content and activity on their sites.
Natalie Hitchins, the house’s product manager and at Which ?, said: “Our studies show that review sharing teams continue to thrive on Facebook, leaving online shoppers in a massive threat of being tricked into buying Amazon products that have been encouraged reviews.
“It is transparent that Facebook has not fulfilled its commitment to the CMA and will have to urgently deal with the wave of false review teams on its site, or the regulator will have to interfere again.
“The inability of sites like Facebook to take strong action against bad practices underscores the desire for online platforms to take greater responsibility for content and activity on their sites.”