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Does the regulation say anything about deceptively moderating reviews? e.g. deleting all the low star reviews?

edit: it doesn't seem so. You just have use some weasel language:

>The final rule also bars a business from misrepresenting that the reviews on a review portion of its website represent all or most of the reviews submitted when reviews have been suppressed based upon their ratings or negative sentiment.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...

How does this stop one of the most common practices?

* Step 1, take a product with a terrible rating

* Step 2, create a new SKU for the exact same product so it has no ratings

* Step 3, get a handful of fake 5-star reviews (in some way the FTC isn't going to crack down on)

* Step 4, blast the old terribly reviewed product that now has good reviews on marketing

* Step 5, get 10s of thousands of sales, $$$

* Step 6, let the terrible reviews pour in

Repeat to step 1 (possibly under a different brand name).

This is an important thing to tackle too. Amazon is notorious for allowing shady practices like Sell product A for lots of 5* reviews, then change the product listing to a completely different thing (which may or may not deserve 5) ...

Another aspect is review solicitation. eg: ios games often pop up with their own modal of "Rate us" and if you click 5 it redirects you to app store to make a review, if you click 4 or less it redirects you to a feedback form. They grease the path for positive reviewers.

If an app pops up a "rate us" modal, it gets a 1-star in the app store, with a note to the developer why. I don't care how great your app is.

Absolutely my practice as well. App devs should never be in the business of nagging for reviews.

on my phone, I have play store firewalled and only allow it out when I want updates/install something.

if I could be bothered with the effort, this is the kind of petty I would engage in.

iOS: That’s 100% against the rules. Much like other dark patterns like forcing a sign up or location access as gating to the rest of the app. Or using notifications for advertising.

Now if only Apple would enforce those (or stop doing them themselves).

Unenforced rules aren't rules so much as taxes on the honest.

That’s a pretty clever phrase!

I've thought about starting a page to call out the apps that abuse push notifications for ads to show that Apple isn't enforcing its rule.

> 4.5.4 ... Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.

The worst offender is DoorDash. If you turn off push ads, after you place an order it will prompt you to turn on notifications "to get the latest on your order". Agreeing turns on ads. You get the prompt even if you already have order update notifications enabled.

oof - the app we work on at my company does all of these..

Well I understand why people don’t like some of them, the truth is the vast majority of the App Store rules are really good as an end user/consumer.

Unfortunately Apple doesn’t seem to care unless the rule is really good for Apple.

Did you just have an “Are we the baddies?” moment?

Does the new product have the same ASIN ?

How could they allow this?

Isn’t that against App Store TOS?

To all commenters quickly pointing out the ways this rule is far from perfect: you are completely right. This being clarified, is the alternative doing nothing? Because that's where we are.

Well, I think where we are is having to prove its fraudulent. Agreed, impractically difficult.

When the FTC says "we're cracking down on online reviews" with things like this the average Joe gains more confidence in them, so yes, the doing nothing approach is actually better IMO.

So never do anything unless you can guarantee a particular outcome?

That’s a stretch. But things like this only create a false illusion of safety/honesty which can actually be a tailwind for dishonesty.

My assessment is more that the average consumer won't have any idea that the FTC is doing this, so I am not real worried about the downsides.

Not initially, but in time they tend to hear about it. Some shops are bound to brag that their reviews are FTC compliant and unbiased, etc.

So, don’t do anything at all because there will always be an issue with anything you do? Being negative is a weakness.

How about; do things that you can enforce and expect a positive net impact from, do things in a way that will address the dozens of obvious first impression questions that came up here due to lack of specifics. If you’re going to do it, put some thought into its execution and administration.

And most of all, don’t make global generalizations on commentary that is quite specific and on a very particular topic.

Well step 3 is the part they just made illegal. If you are OK with breaking the law, nothing is going to stop you until you get caught and fined. Presumably the getting caught and fined part will be enough deterrent.

There's a difference between "fake as defined by the FTC which you will actually get in trouble for" and "fake".

It's your comment in the context of the FTC. You said it was fake, in the context of the FTC. Why are you debating yourself?

Please re-read. The FTC defining it as fake means nothing if the FTC does not, in practice, crack down on it regularly.

The FTC can say it's illegal to do X, and all companies can do X with impunity if the FTC, in practice, does not do anything about it when companies do X.

what qualifies a review as fake? If I write it, it's a review isn't it? The whole thing is subjective. Plenty of people love products I can't stand

I don't know this seems to be fairly broad statement that could allow enforcement for any number of schemes:

> The final rule addresses reviews and testimonials that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business or its products or services, or that misrepresent the experience of the person giving it.

Amazon is loaded with LLM generated reviews now. They stand out as overly wordy and rambling while being light on any critical discussion of the product.

And how do they even audit it? Do they require only users who verifiably used/purchased the product to submit reviews? Do they require the reviewer to actually use the product? for sufficient amount of time so that the review is more than just "first impression"? So many loopholes, this won't change anything except perhaps a few big marketplaces but it's doubtful they will be able to police it

I don't have the most faith it will be easy to execute but I would imagine:

- Some disgruntled people at company's could leak directly, which would make engaging in this behavior riskier

- Random individuals or competing companies could monitor product reviews and report. For example, show that an Amazon product ID used to be for another product 3 months ago when reviews were written.

I'm optimistic. There are a lot of regulations (including digital regulations) that everyone ends up following even if the government isn't monitoring things themselves. The risk of penalty just needs to be high enough, and hopefully places like Amazon realize the downside/penalty of fake reviews now makes it worth policing.

It obviously won't help your "first impression" review problem but that's not the intent of the law and not sure why the government would be involved in that. A lot of movies don't hold up well on a rewatch, too. If you are that particular about buying something that lasts X years then you can seek out dedicated advice blogs/youtube channels.

That's actually a really good point. I can review a can opener in a few minutes. Either it opens the can or it doesn't. How would I ever review something like a Ford F-350? I don't even have a trailer heavy enough to test the towing capacity.

Well, that's a bad example ... The can opener I had for the first 50 years of my life left a dangerous crazy sharp metal edge around the opening which I cut myself on more than once. The Oxo can opener I've had for the last 10 years rolls the edge as it cuts and removes the entire top of the can; what's left is extremely safe, at least by comparison with the old style.

Then again, when I was much younger, I had a backpacking can opener that was useful when hiking in places where sometimes buying canned foods made sense. It was about as large as a very large postage stamp, and crazy good for the size and weight. I wouldn't want to use it at home (much), but it was awesome when I had to carry it around.

So, even for can openers, the story can be complicated.

Also, assuming that the primary purpose of an F350 is towing is ... interesting. Lots and lots of them here in rural NM (as much as anyway, anyway), and they are rarely towing anything.

Not debating the practicality here, but even if you need your truck to do something only once in the entirety of your ownership, it needs to be capable of this all the time. Towing, crawling, etc.

I disagree. I've never had a vehicle that does 100% of whatever I'd want a vehicle to do. At some point we need to make tradeoffs and accept that we'll either have limitations or need to solve some problems in a different way.

Letting something that is 1% of operating hours for a device drive requirements strongly is often a mistake. With some obvious exceptions because e.g. I cannot choose when I am going to engage in maximum braking and defer it to a different vehicle.

They do make trade offs. Just not the same you might make. The F350s are limited on where they can park and are a pain in the ass to drive around a city. Some people tow stuff more frequently than they go into the city though, so it probably is a reasonable trade off to them. Also comes with some other perks like comfort and more beefy off road capabilities. Something that is valuable in rural areas even without towing.

I tow stuff about a dozen times a year and live in a city. I drive a Tahoe because not being able to tow when you want to is a pretty big inconvenience even though I’m a single occupant driver 90% of the time and it’s way bigger than I “need”. Turns out it’s quite comfortable and I just like it, even if I wasn’t towing ever.

I went years of renting vehicles just to tow. It sucks in a lot of ways. No one just wakes up and thinks “I’m going to tow some stuff”. You’re doing it for a reason, there’s probably a high amount of labor involved in that reason, trying to do it all in the rental window or find an appropriate vehicle on the day you need it. Is a challenge. I’ve set rental reservations then it rains so I can’t do the work I needed to. Clear skies tomorrow but have to wait a week for another rental to be available. It’s a hassle.

Another thing I struggle with is my towing needs fluctuate a lot. Earlier this year I was doing a construction project and ended up needing to tow stuff practically every day for 6 weeks. If I tried to do that any other way than owning a capable vehicle, it’d have been logistically challenging. Trying to time vehicle rental with trailer and equipment rentals would have dragged the construction project out to easily triple the time just by adding delay, probably much longer. Not to mention the cost of it all. Which the bigger vehicles do cost more, but they are assets even if depreciating. When you rent it’s pure expense. The rent cs own calc can flip quickly.

Sure. I'm not saying it's completely unreasonable.

Here the person was saying "once in the entirety of your ownership". If it's really once in the vehicle's life, then you really should rent something else when you need this.

I understand renting vehicles to move stuff is a PITA. I've used the hardware store's trucks several times and it adds a lot of anxiety to a project (though I've never had a really tough time with availability).

Ah I think he was making a point about the need being Boolean more so than a literal meaning of once. You said 1% which probably matches up to my usage of the tow feature. All good though, those rentals are definitely the most available but they rarely work for me as I usually need more time. They design it to be highly available for short store-to-home trips.

Occasionally I still rent, sometimes I need a bigger truck than I have due to weight.

I bought a truck for similar reasons (was tired of constantly having to rent/borrow cars to tow or haul/pick up something that doesn't fit in a "normal" car). I got a lot of utility use out of it over the years and I do honestly agree, even though I now almost never have to use it for anything truck-related I'm still very happy with it, it's very comfortable and reliable. I'd buy another one in a heartbeat. The convenience of knowing I can spontaneously throw anything I want in the back without ever thinking or planning about it in the rare cases I do still occasionally have to is just the cherry on top at this point.

> but even if you need your truck to do something only once in the entirety of your ownership

I'd just say rent something for that one off time in its entire ownership. Otherwise, I'd be daily driving a 26' box truck because I moved apartments every few years.

One time I had to ship a few pallets of stuff across the country. I guess I should have just bought a semi-trailer truck as a daily driver.

I can rent a box truck for moving easially enough, and generally I know far enough in advance that I can reserve it.

However I've never found a truck I can rent to two. Sure I can rent trucks, but they come up with a large pile of fine print which says I cannot two. Even those box trucks cannot tow, or can tow but only their trailer which has specific restrictions on what you can use it for. Oh, and the trailer they allow you to use has surge brakes which are terrible.

I've rented trucks to tow a few times over the years. Enterprise truck rental has trucks for towing, just a weight restriction.

But to be honest the vast majority of times I've needed to rent a truck to tow something it's because I was renting something towable. I can't imagine I'd bother renting some equipment from one place just to rent a truck from someplace else.

I see a ton of 5 star reviews that just say something like "Super fast shipping!" and think, "OK, have you even opened the box? does it work? is this review for FedEx?"

Some will be obvious, such as a review for a book or game or other media item that hasn't been publicly released. I would expect a platform such as Amazon would have responsibility to suppress reviews for items that are not, and have never been for sale. A flood of reviews all coming in immediately after the product goes on sale, or a statistically improbable distribution of geographic locations would also be suspicious.

Rating averaging methods _should_ treat scores with fewer data points as less trustworthy and either suppress showing the score or apply some early-rating bias. I.e. if users are sorting by rating new products should never be near the top.

Otherwise it should be possible to sort products or even brands/sellers by age and prefer older ones with more reviews.

I'm not sure Amazon does the first though ATM, and it definitely doesn't do the latter.

This doesn't help when every useless chinese widget on Amazon with a RNG created brand name has literally thousands or even tens of thousands of fake reviews. Yeah like 10,000+ were so enamored with this {insert useless item here} that they felt compelled to leave a 5 star review. Amazon has totally sold out like eBay. I don't shop on either anymore because it's hard to find real brands and feedback and reviews are fake. Not to mention the blatant fakes of major products ...

Unfortunately some of the weird things I need I can't figure out who else sells them. I can search amazon or ebay and find someone but they don't have a presence elsewhere (at least not that I can find)

Not sure why this was flagged - it echoes my experience pretty accurately!

Im curious about the opposite practice, sharing reviews across several SKUs. I basically stopped looking at reviews because they were unrelated to the one I was buying.

I get that some products have configurations, like color and size, but often times wildly different products are grouped together.

On Amazon you can filter by the current configuration on the review page (at least on desktop).

On mobile they make it pretty hard to read reviews (or maybe im in some sort of A/B test where I'm only allowed to ask their LLM about what the reviews say?)

Case in point: candle scents.

It's in the rules. Emphasis mine:

Fake or False Consumer Reviews, Consumer Testimonials, and Celebrity Testimonials: The final rule addresses reviews and testimonials that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business or its products or services

If you covertly switch the product, then the reviews shown are from people who did not have actual experience with the product.

Something similar to this happens on eBay. Sellers will sell a product say a usb adapter, cheap and fully functional, users leave reviews and then the seller changes the listing to be a completely different item, retaining all the previous ratings and sale counts. How would this apply here is a good question.

Wouldn't like to assume but regulatory bodies usually think about these things in advance no ?

Haven't ebay reviews always meant to be about the seller and not necessarily the product? Ebay started with the expectation it was normal people auctioning used goods. Having reviews for a specific product doesn't make sense when there is no fixed product. Obviously things have changed over the years but the site is still largely built around those assumptions.

Yeah so when you view a listing now from a business it will show "100 units sold" but you're right it's crazy you can just change the whole product. I think it's specific for the business sellers.

Airbnb's business model in a nutshell :)

Shop other places besides Amazon. They've enabled all of this to increase profits.

I mean, step 3 would be illegal... your question is impossible to answer, since you hand waive the illegal step as saying "they do it in such a way that the FTC isn't going to crack down on".

This is basically the equivalent of saying "How are you going to stop crime X if they commit crime X in a way that let's them get away with X?"

Either they find a way to enforce the rules against step 3, or they fail to do so. We can't know yet.

The online shoppers, that I know, have learned to pass on products with a few high reviews, in a highly competitive space. If the signal weak, it's not something to trust.

yes, "This final rule, among other things, prohibits [...] certain review suppression practices[...]"

https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/federal-register-no...

Further down the notice cites the scenario: "[...] more than 4,500 merchants that were automatically publishing only 4- or 5-star consumer reviews"

I guess manufacturers will now just have to reject anything other than a five star review immediately. As long as it is not submitted, it cannot be suppressed

FINALLY a use for MangoDB https://github.com/dcramer/mangodb

That lists a complexity of O(1) for all operations. I'm not sure that will scale. I expect my database to implement O(0) or lower complexity.

Will you settle for O(sqrt(1))?

Come on, regulation can only go so far. The ruling is regarding third party review aggregators, a discussion about self hosted reviews is off-topic.

Amazing all the newfound lawyers in the HN section here pointing out "loopholes" in the rule and then getting corrected by the next commenter.

The FTC continues to do the good, thankless work of making good public policy. I appreciate it.

It's almost like they expect the law to be dysfunctional or unevenly applied.

But did the FTC think about this loophole that I just thought of in three seconds? I am so smart!

>> > the rule bans reviews and testimonials attributed to people who don’t exist or are generated by artificial intelligence, people who don’t have experience with the business or product/services, or misrepresent their experience.

I guess they don't know about how people scam Amazon reviews by getting legit people to simply buy the product and leave a five star review and then get reimbursed for their purchase later by the company or the company the company hired to get these people to do this.

(From 2022) Inside the Underground Market for Fake Amazon Reviews

https://www.wired.com/story/fake-amazon-reviews-underground-...

Actually that's covered by the rule.

Buying Positive or Negative Reviews: The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative. It clarifies that the conditional nature of the offer of compensation or incentive may be expressly or implicitly conveyed.

I hope this is actively enforced with real teeth very soon. I 1-star fake products and call them out in reviews resulting in the devious vendor somehow being able to send me a postcard to my real physical address offering money for 5 stars. The sham vendor also spam my email weekly. Amazon appears to actively support this process. It needed to be curtailed decades ago.

>> The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives.

Amazon has had this rule in place for a long time and I still get cards in the boxes of the stuff I buy, "Give us a 5 star review and get 30% off your next purchase!"

Clearly Amazon doesn't know about this or isn't generally enforcing it. I'm wondering how the FTC is going to patrol this since Amazon has already had this rule in place for a while and it hasn't dissuaded sellers from changing their habits.

The FTC can force Amazon to do more about it. Just proving they are trying would be a big help.

Amazon is currently providing a LLM-generated summary of these faked customer reviews. To abide by the FTC ruling, Amazon would now have to prove that all of their training data is legitimate customer reviews. Do you think they will actually do that?

If the FTC wants to they can. The government as a lot more power than Amazon, the only question is will they use it.

I think the bigger issue Amazon will face is that you can edit items in a big way... it's not like just clarifying "Multi-socket extension cord" to "Three socket extension cord" but swapping out products wholesale once you've built up a clout of good reviews on it.

Honestly - Amazon really needs some serious lawsuits to force it to stop being such a bad actor in the online retail space.

This is an extremely hard problem to solve. What degree of change makes it a different product? And that doesn't even touch the problem that products can look identical on the outside and use cheap crap on the inside. Amazon is not a bad actor here. They have every incentive to solve this problem. But they won't, not because they don't try, but because this is a problem as old as commerce.

Users need more ability to intelligently contribute. I just hit this yesterday. 2-star review that was actually entirely about the third party that shipped expired stock, not about the product itself. All I could do is flag the review as "other", no text. (As it was the only review I also reported it under the something wrong with the product which does allow text.) And specifically give us "wrong version", "wrong product" and "seller, not product" flags. And don't reject my review that clearly called out that this isn't the real thing. I didn't simply get a counterfeit, the whole listing was counterfeit.

Abuse problems? Give more weight to squawks by people with a lot of purchases and not a lot of what are found to be bogus gripes.

It's a hard problem for a computer to solve - a computer shouldn't be used to solve it... computers were never used to solve it before Amazon because it's clearly a hard problem (and it scales really well with human labor).

Amazon are being a bunch of cheap bastards and skimping on human moderation of product listings - we, as a society, don't need to give them a free pass for trying to make an even more enormous profit. This is only deeply unprofitable to moderate if you have a lot of products listed you're never going to sell any of.

This is 100% the problem.

Suddenly we now have a ton of "new" issues cropping up everywhere. Suddenly being last 20-ish years. These aren't "new". They're just difficult to automate with a computer program, and every company is cheapo now and tries to automate everything with a computer program.

This problem doesn't exist at, say, Walmart. Presumably they physically vet products to at least some degree.

Walmart shuffles parts the other way - the barcode will change every year or so or whatever so they can be sure to clearance out the old.

Walmart’s online store has some similar problems. But you maybe it $5 to lost a product, $10 to change it, problem solved. Now you can hire real humans.

"generated by artificial intelligence" ? So if I write "this product sucks" for a review and I use Bing or some other source to rewrite this to "this product's quality does not live up to the manufacturer's claim" based on my input does that make it a crime?

I read it as "attributed to people who ... are generated by artificial intelligence.'

Insurance against the argument that "This person who wrote the review does exist, just not in a flesh body, they're an AI creation." But that might also be an instant-flop argument legally since I'm sure "personhood" has some definition near-future AI can't hope to approach.

Christ almighty you people are exhausting.

Of course they know. One thing at a time.

Especially now that literally anything the FTC does could be struck down by a federal judge at any time, unless it is explicitly written out or delegated legislation.

This spring our one year old de-humidifier died. The manufacturer would send you a new replacement unit, but first you had to leave a review of the new unit. After the review was submitted, they would send you an Amazon gift card with the replacement value. So the old units that died never get a 1 star, and the new units being "sold" are getting 5 stars.

I guess it is still better than most companies that will find whatever reason they can not to replace faulty equipment.

The press release from FTC containing the entire rule: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...

> It also bans businesses from creating or selling reviews or testimonials. Businesses that knowingly buy fake reviews, procure them from company insiders or disseminate fake reviews will be penalized. It also prohibits businesses from using “unfounded or groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or certain false public accusations.”

Still seems like it leaves in a giant loophole for all of those overly-cheery reviews that start with, "This item was provided to me by the manufacturer in exchange for a fair and honest review!"

You are no longer allowrd to provide compensation for reviews. So companies can still send out stuff for your to possibly reviews but it can't make recieving items dependent on actually writing a review, even 'implicitly', though we'll see how enforcement shakes out.

It will be impossible to enforce. The people who don't leave good reviews simply will get dropped from the mailing list. However, it forces the whole thing to kind of move underground, which should help at least reduce the scale of the problem, and creates a deterrent against getting too aggressive with it.

And if enforced aggressively, will only provide a set up for false flag operations to get a competitor banned for fake reviews. I think we've already seen this movie in SEO....

The evidentiary standards for Google search ranking changes is VERY different than the one used for FTC enforcement actions.

I'm pretty sure getting caught for trying to frame a company for buying reviews would bring criminal charges that are more serious than the FTC enforcement action.

Could coupons be a way around this? ... [deleted]

edit: after RTFM, page 42, coupons are considered valuable:

> For the reasons explained in this section, the Commission is finalizing the definition of “purchase a consumer review” to mean to provide something of value, such as money, gift certificates, products, services, discounts, coupons, contest entries, or another review, in exchange for a consumer review.

Why would a coupon be a way around this?

I think that document is specifically about taxes and coupons. It is not intended to define "compensation" for every statue in California and certainly not for federally issued rules from the FTC.

Even then, that rule is about whether the coupon issuer is compensated when a coupon is used, NOT about if a customer is compensated if they are given a coupon.

Wouldn't this ban a huge swath of you tube reviews? I've watched plenty of youtube videos where some one uses a product and says something like "I had no interest in this thing, but the manufacturer offered it to me for free if I made a video of me using and gave my impressions of it"

Compensation can still be provided as long as it is not conditional on the reviewer expressing a particular sentiment. So your example could still be allowed.

> The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...

You can non-explicitly enforce positive review coverage by simply not sending review units to people who are likely to say things bad about your products. If you send early review units to 10 people one year, and the next year only 6 of them get review units, and the 4 people who didn't get review units this year were the 4 who gave the harshest review, the message is now out that you need to say good things if you want to continue getting early access to devices for reviews.

SnazzyLabs is a good example - he should be well within the criteria for Apple to be sending him iPhones and Macs early, but I can only assume Apple thinks he's too critical when he finds an issue he doesn't like. Thus he has to buy his review units on street release date along with everyone else. How many people are giving less critical reviews because of that?

nVidia tried to pull this stunt with the YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed. They weren't singing the praises of RTX and DLSS loud enough for nVidia and were threatened with having review samples withheld until they changed their tune.

> It clarifies that the conditional nature of the offer of compensation or incentive may be expressly or implicitly conveyed.

So implicity only offering review units to positive reviewers is still not allowed.

So if I style myself as a negative only reviewer, they have to give me a review unit? Like I'm that judge in the olympics that never gives anyone a perfect score. The best your product will get from me is a 2/10.

OK, then this has been the de-facto standard amongst many industries for a long time. Plenty of reviewers say stuff like "it really is weird! I made one video about how I didn't like a product. After that I was never invited to attend a launch for a product, get early access, etc. I guess those two could not be correlated at all!"

Based on the text you have shared it'd be perfectly fine if you were paid to write a "neutral" review.

The rule also prohibits implicit compensation, but we'll see if it's enforced/enforceable.

Hopefully this part fixes the Amazon review problem, because it lets them go after Amazon itself...

> It also prohibits them from ... disseminating such testimonials, when the business ... should have known that the reviews or testimonials were fake or false.

Many of the Amazon fake review practices are extremely in the "should have known" category.

Do testimonials count as reviews? Bad news for all the product launches I see on here which are endorsed by 10 unidentifiable "people" with abbreviated surnames and suspiciously stock-photo-ish headshots, if so.

Don’t worry, a judge in Texas in the pocket of some big company will shoot this down, just like the attempt to abolish non-competes

[flagged]

How about we get Congress to do their jobs?

> the SCOTUS judges are the de facto experts of all matters and the regulators

And thankfully so.

Curious why you think these nine individuals are better suited than people with actual expertise?

In the ruling in which they self-ordained these new powers, Gorsuch confused nitrous oxide with nitrogen oxide, five times. Better hope Gorsuch didn't rule on dental anesthetics on your next visit to the dentist.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supreme-court...

Especially since one of the main arguments I have heard from folks who approve of the ruling is "but these agency people are un-elected officials!" So are Supreme Court Justices, who unlike agency people have no ethics rules.

Because allowing the "people with actual expertise" to decide for themselves how much power they have over the lives of others is a blatantly obvious conflict of interest?

As opposed to the judges who fly on donor private jets and then take the cases of the said donors. No conflict of interest there. Zero. And, oh yeah, zero enforceable ethics rules.

The disdain for expertise is something I would not expect on HN, but here we are.

I think you should take those politically motivated hit pieces with a few more grains of salt. Those incidents supposedly happened years ago, right? Ask yourself: why is it only now, after the overturning of Roe v Wade, that there's suddenly a huge uproar in certain circles over judicial ethics?

But that's all beside the point. This has nothing to do with how much "expertise" the courts or the bureaucrats running the FTC may or may not have, or how corrupt they may or may not be. Even if they were 100% competent and well meaning, giving any one agency unchecked power would still be a bad idea. There are very good reasons why the legislative, judicial, and executive branches are separate. Chevron concentrated the powers of all three into the hands of individual bureaucrats at the heads of government agencies (and therefore ultimately, into the hands of the president, whoever that happens to be at the time).

No one person should be allowed to have all the infinity stones at once, regardless of how much expertise they have.

I hope the FTC staffs a large office for enforcement on this. There are surely many hundreds of companies in the business of selling fake reviews, many of them outside the US, and I don't expect much change in the consumer reality of "most reviews are fake" without a great deal of investigatory effort tracing money flows to shut these operations down.

> the rule bans reviews and testimonials attributed to people who don’t exist or are generated by artificial intelligence, people who don’t have experience with the business or product/services, or misrepresent their experience.

Does the rule apply to private citizens? I wonder if the First Amendment agrees with penalizing private citizens "who don’t have experience with the business or product/services, or misrepresent their experience". They may mean that businesses can't engage people to write such reviews.

Also, how will they handle the scale of enforcement? The large companies seem easy - one enforcement action covers all of Yelp, another all of Amazon, etc. But what about the infinite reviews at smaller vendoers?

Overall though, I think this is great and long past due. The lawlessness of the Internet - fraud, spying, etc. - is absurd.

> Does the rule apply to private citizens? I wonder if the First Amendment agrees with penalizing private citizens "who don’t have experience with the business or product/services, or misrepresent their experience".

I'm sure someone will try to argue that, but the way I interpreted it is that this is not banning people from sharing fake reviews, it's banning businesses from publishing and misrepresenting those reviews as genuine. i.e. It's regulating the business's practices, not the (purported) consumers'.

Effectively, I think it still bans joke reviews. You can submit a joke review, but the company cannot publish it

> Does the rule apply to private citizens? I wonder if the First Amendment agrees

> with penalizing private citizens "who don’t have experience with the business or

> product/services, or misrepresent their experience". They may mean that

> businesses can't engage people to write such reviews.

The First Amendment doesn't typically protect your right to commit fraud, no.

Almost all of the rules include the clause "for a business". The only rules that don't to my eye are basically "no one can make libelous or threatening statements to have a review suppressed or removed" and "no one can sell, distribute, purchase, or procure fake indicators of social media influence [...] for commercial purposes"

> Does the rule apply to private citizens? I wonder if the First Amendment agrees with penalizing private citizens "who don’t have experience with the business or product/services, or misrepresent their experience"

Maybe I'm wrong but doesn't the first ammended apply to public speech ? Is there some nuances there when a private company is involved and responsible for the content on their platform, in this case reviews? Genuinely never sure of these things for the US.

Does the first amendment protect financial fraud? Is this strictly a speech issue? Doesn't the first amendment only apply to people in the US? I ask because the shenanigans are world wide.

I've had decent results with fakespot and not buying anything lower than a B rating, with a very few exceptions (not enough reviews for example). I think with a little digilence my Amazon experience has gotten better the past few years since I don't just buy the first cheapest thing that pops up because I'm in a hurry.

Is there something about the American system such that the FTC is more active/aggressive during Democrat office? Anyone else notice this trend? If it's real what causes it?

Of course. The chair of the FTC is a political position so changes with each administration. Very broadly, US Democrats are more in favor of regulation to stop abuses and US Republicans are more ‘hands off, the market will sort it out’ in their approach.

With the FTC in particular, neither party wanted the FTC to be aggressive. Biden wanted to appoint someone else but had all his appointments blocked by the far-right. Lina Khan got in because populists (left and right) saw her as a weapon that could be wielded against Big Tech.

There's actually a big cloud hanging over the Kamala Harris candidacy over whether or not Lina Khan will remain FTC chair. There's a lot of tech money flooding into her campaign. Though in this case it's also to replace the current SEC chair, because the SEC chair is actually enforcing securities law against crypto fraudsters, who would really like to keep their scam going.

Same with Trump. Big Tech banned him for, y'know, instigating a coup d'etat. But three years later, Big Tech is now trying to wine and dine him, because the FTC is scaring the shit out of Big Tech. You have Tim Cook going to Trump and Trump saying how he's going to stop the EU from attacking US companies. Hell, Elon Musk bought Twitter just so he could turn it into an arm of the Trump candidacy. And who knows what Mark Zuckerberg thinks. Likewise, with the SEC stuff, Trump used to be a (rightful) big critic of crypto, until he realized he could make money selling tacky NFTs of himself, and is now also trying to get in on that crypto money.

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>Is there something about the American system such that the FTC is more active/aggressive during Democrat office?

Well republicans generally shoot down anything that is pro-consumer at the cost of business profits, even when it's related to consumer awareness or safety, so the only way to get decent pro-consumer rules enacted is when democrats are in power.

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These rules and regulations have been in the works for some time, so I don't know where you're getting that.

I wouldn't surprise me if this started while Trump was president, but because of time is just coming out now. It would surprise me if it this started in Obama's first term - but it wouldn't be unreasonable to find out it did.

That's a weird take.

Some of the large cases that made hackernews in the past year had a similar comment to yours even though the investigation was started under Trump and only completed recently - if you like the democrats though you will give all credit to the democrats.

Which is to say there is some political differences, but don't make such accusations before you carefully check to ensure it isn't just your bias to observe more when democrats are in power and thus see more.

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Uh, it's more like they spent several years working on it and it happens to be an election year when its published.

> [1] The final rule announced today follows an advance notice of proposed rulemaking and a notice of proposed rulemaking announced in November 2022 and June 2023, respectively. The FTC also held an informal hearing on the proposed rule in February 2024.

[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...

The review suppression rule is hilarious. The intent seems to be to prevent people from using asymmetric access to the legal system to bully reviewers into removing reviews they don't like. The remedy? The thing the law was trying to prevent.

So... wasn't this fraud even before and thus covered in some penal code section?

There’s a line between fraud and first they’re trying to navigate. Suppressing speech in the USA is notoriously hard, but can be done if targeted narrowly enough.

The first thing you have to do is ban USA-based online marketplace companies from hosting foreign vendors. Then you can better regulate what is left.

Or you can hold the marketplace companies responsible for whoever markets on them.

Of course can't hold foreign marketplaces responsible at all - but that is a different loophole we can close (if it becomes a problem Amazon will ensure it is)

Related

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41911915

Amazon must be quaking in their boots.

Historic date 2024-10-21: the last time anyone lied in a review.

I’m glad they’re trying. It remains to be seen how this’ll sort out.

People can break laws. By your logic I guess we shouldn't have laws then.

> People can break laws. By your logic I guess we shouldn't have laws then.

Let me reverse this on you, how much and what type of punishment and penalty should be levied if laws are broken?

Like this false online reviews ruling, how far should punishment and penalty go?

> how much and what type of punishment and penalty should be levied if laws are broken?

Depends on the impact of the crime the person was convicted of and how likely they are to do it again.

> how far should punishment and penalty go?

For companies who knowingly solicit or publish fake/compensated reviews: disgorgement of profits and refunds without conditions to everyone who asks. Repeated violations come with escalating fines that are a percentage of revenue (not profits) plus bans on company officers holding the position of officer of a publicly traded company for a number of years.

I went to a salon recently and was told I could get 10% off by leaving a 5 star review BEFORE I received any service. That is something I really hate and I wish review sites monitored for that more. Would this be the same thing as buying reviews?

The number of establishments I have seen doing this has skyrocketed. The last 2, I edited my review afterwards to 1 star and saying “this place gives a discount for good reviews”.

I mean, I would just leave.

Because I'm not going to leave a review, don't really leave many reviews. But I'm especially not going to leave a review before I've received service. But if I don't leave a review, I'd be concerned I would be getting deliberately poor service.

And if I'm going to get bad service, why should I subject myself to that?

If anything, I would leave then give a 1 star review saying they give discounts to people who give good reviews beforehand and the explanation I gave above.

And they delete your review. There needs to be a requirement to archive all reviews for seven-ten years. When it was posted, how long it was up, content and user. This is such a rabbit hole.

People cheer when government makes a rule like this but there is a huge costly enforcement mechanism that goes with this. That has to be implemented and maintained. Making the rule is step one, and there are hundreds more steps that have to happen any number of times, forever. Good luck. Making laws that cannot be enforced just increases the cost of government without having the intended effect. I can't think of anything that the prime offenders would like more than that.

It is truly difficult because you do have people who leave fake negative reviews as well. And fake reviews, whether good or bad, should be deleted. They are useless, they are only there to affect review scores.

It's a convoluted problem with no good answer so far.

Yes, that would probably fall under this because 10% off is a form of monetary compensation. But most review sites ban this type of thing, but businesses do it anyway.

If you think that's bad, I've seen doctors do this (albeit after providing service.)

Leave a review, get the service, edit the review later.

Do you think there will be any impact on sites like HN?

If the product is fake too, does a fake review count?

Next can we ban 1-star reviews that just complain about the shipping and not the product itself?

Why, if you're thinking of buying the product from the same vendor, would you not reconsider buying from a different vendor just for shipping issues? Shipping is a major part of buying something online, so I don't think it's a bad review to have available

It's a review of the process or the seller, not the product. That having been said, Amazon and most similar online retail "marketplaces" make the seller much less visible than the product, encouraging the reviews to go in the wrong place.

I like how you've reduced the entire internet to just Amazon. It is possible to have reviews on other websites. I know they really try to keep that a secret though.

If UPS put the package by your neighbor, switching vendors doesn't really do anything.

Or if you bought from a third party seller, but your review is attached to an FBA product, the shipping review has nothing to do with the current item.

>If UPS put the package by your neighbor, switching vendors doesn't really do anything.

Switching to a seller that ships using fedex or usps would do something. We've had the inverse problem, fedex is the one that always screws up our deliveries and we actively look for sellers that don't use them.

If the review was that their shipped packages were improperly packaged to survive shipping of any carrier would be useful info. Finding out they took 6 days to arrange for delivery after the order is useful. Bad shipping doesn't just mean the selected carrier had issues

Marketplaces need a vendor rating and product ratings. When leaving a review, the form could have sections on shipping separate from the product.

My only 2-star review about my book on Manning's web site is a complaint about not receiving the book. I don't know what madem them give me two stars instead of one. Maybe, they liked the order process. :) If they had reached out to me, I could help them contact with Manning support. But, there's no way I can reach someone from a review (there's only a name listed there, nothing else).

How about the App Store reviews on the Amazon app complaining about individual products, or podcast app reviews that are actually about individual podcasts?

I know it's offtopic, but try reading some recipe reviews...

Chocolate cake recipe, needing a lot of butter, sugar, eggs, etc.

And below it a one star review "I only replaced the eggs with aquafaba, put in just a third of sugar and a third of oil to make it healthier, used cocoa poweder instead of baking chocolate, and it was horrible, hard, clumpy, didn't taste good at all, never making this again, 1 star!"

Wouldn't this make the glorious reviews for the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer illegal? I mean this thing has saved and ended marriages, enabled people to live their dreams of starting zydeco bands, started the boomerang pigeon hunting craze, and much more.

https://www.amazon.com/Hutzler-3571-571-Banana-Slicer/produc...

Ah, the days when the Internet was fun.

Amazonz doooomed

It all seems quite simple to me. Just require an order number and the date of purchase to write a review and require all reviews be publicly available in a machine readable format and that anyone may publish them.

If you pay me I can write the same using 1000 pages without adding anything useful.

Good, but HOW?

Great, this solves for all the small players. What about big tech. They will just have to ignore this ruling.

If you don't have the time to thoroughly investigate material non-public information before deciding where to have lunch, are you even a responsible consumer? /s

The normalization of blatant lying in business is really frustrating, both as a businessperson and as a member of the public. We (correctly) consider just making shit up for their own benefit a major strike against a person, but we implicitly tolerate it in the companies that run a good chunk of our lives! Hell, in some cases we even celebrate it: "wow, look how scrappy that person is, what a brilliant marketing ploy!" - no, they're just a liar.

There seems to be a LOT of normalization of straight up lies, made-up-on-the-spot facts, and disinformation the past 6-8 years. Caveat emptor seems to be the SOP rather than a reminder to be skeptical. Of course, that's just my n=1 observation.

Good intentions by FTC. Unfortunately nearly impossible to enforce. It's almost like FTC banning junk/spam emails. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this will be enforced and some big players will end up paying large fines. I think Amazon has to get their poop together and fix the comingling product reviews and other ways through their sieve that make this behavior rampant.

How is it impossible to enforce?

Bunch of people report Amazon as being rife with fake reviews. FTC puts together some sort of working group that does some research to figure out if it's true. If it's true, they reach out to Amazon telling them to fix it after handing them a fine. After a while, they verify that Amazon implemented sufficient safe-guards against fake reviews.

Sure, it wouldn't get rid of all fake reviews, but surely it'd be better than the current approach of doing absolutely nothing, no?

How can you enforce people giving fake reviews for things they bought? Bring the review police? How can you prove they're given free products to review them positively? Don't get me wrong, I wish online reviews weren't utterly broken but it seems like business wants it this way. I certainly hope this will get fixed and not jump to the next loophole.

> business wants it this way

Of course they want it. It's purely objective for them and purely deceptive to the consumer. Therefore, it's the perfect thing for the FTC to regulate - I mean this is what their purpose is.

Enforcement will be difficult, but I really think platforms like Amazon isn't the problem. They're a unified platform, it's pretty easy for them to enforce better review. Maybe you need to have actually bought the product, maybe they monitor product descriptions for asking for reviews, maybe they audit packages for those little "review us 5 stars!" slips, maybe they prevent modifying products, etc.

The true tough thing to enforce is little shops. You know, convenience stores, smoke shops, that type. I've been told, verbally, many times that if I review 5 stars, I get some discount. I doubt the FTC will send physical agents to check that.

I hope this will work for fixing Amazon. But how about a million other websites with fake reviews?

It's hard to bug-squash website by website for sure. They scatter like cockroaches in the light.

But, I think most online buying in the US goes through Amazon and maybe a couple other online retailers. Fix it there and you fixed the problem for 90% of cases.

It isn't hard - you can't get everyone, but find a few influences who you "know" are doing this. Then make them aware they are being investigated - even if you don't have enough evidence to convict that they are aware they could be in trouble will make them stop. Or better yet, tell them you are gathering evidence, but if they cooperate with the investigation you will let them off - then they give you a copy of all the illegal communication trying to buy their good reviews: go after the corporations buying illegal reviews.

Remember you don't need to get everyone doing this. Even a few cases that your get on the nightly news will be enough to stop a large majority of fraud. You just need to get enough that everyone else decides not to do this.

Unfortunately, this rule excludes most of the fake reviews that plague Amazon.

There are a lot of outfits in Pakistan that recruit reviewers in the US by offering a full refund for Chinese products in exchange for a five star review.

This rule should require disclosure of this behavior and frankly any review that does not originate for a bonafide purchase.

The rule covers this

> Buying Positive or Negative Reviews: The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative. It clarifies that the conditional nature of the offer of compensation or incentive may be expressly or implicitly conveyed.

> Fake or False Consumer Reviews, Consumer Testimonials, and Celebrity Testimonials: The final rule addresses reviews and testimonials that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business or its products or services, or that misrepresent the experience of the person giving it. It prohibits businesses from creating or selling such reviews or testimonials. It also prohibits them from buying such reviews, procuring them from company insiders, or disseminating such testimonials, when the business knew or should have known that the reviews or testimonials were fake or false.

I recently bought a $9 TV antenna that promised a $50 Amazon gift card for a five-star review.

Where to get this deal?

Seller was ETBRJTK (known for their quality and honesty!)

That is a dirt cheap acquisition cost.