Amazon has a massive fake review problem and it says social media companies are to blame

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Another popular company has had its products removed from Amazon. This time, RavPower was the target. While Amazon hasn’t come out and directly said why the company had its products removed, it seemingly is due to the company incentivizing positive reviews in exchange for gift cards. This goes against Amazon’s policies.

RavPower isn’t the first company in recent memory to have many of its products wiped from Amazon. Aukey and Mpower met similar fates back in early May. Now, the ecommerce giant has released a new blog post about “creating a trustworthy reviews experience.”

Essentially, Amazon spends time talking about how it feels highlighting reviews is a good thing, but that it works hard to make sure fake reviews don’t find their way onto the platform.

But that’s not all Amazon has to say on the subject. The post goes on to detail that many of these bad-faith reviews originate on social media, where companies and third parties connect with users to persuade them to leave a positive review in exchange for gift cards or free products.

Amazon states that it crawls social sites for these types of conversations and reports them to the platform, but also says that social media companies need to be doing more, and doing it proactively, to “protect customers.”

The company notes that “In the first three months of 2020, we reported more than 300 groups to social media companies, who then took a median time of 45 days to shut down those groups from using their service to perpetrate abuse.” Fast forward to 2021, and Amazon notes that the number jumped to 1,000 and that social companies typically took action within five days.

While the blog post doesn’t call out any specific social platform, it almost certainly means Facebook and Twitter, as they are two of the larger options available. Will these companies take Amazon’s request seriously? We’ll have to wait and see, but I can’t imagine it is the largest priority for them right now.

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