Amazon has created a pretty solid online marketplace where you can end up buying whatever it is that your heart desires at the push of a button without having to go outside. However, it is important to note that fake reviews have become a real thorn in the side of most ecommerce platforms because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up making people doubt the legitimacy of the various products that they can end up purchasing through various online platforms.
While there are definitely a lot of factors that impact the prevalence of fake reviews, according to Amazon the main culprit that should be blamed here is social media. While this could be seen as one tech company placing the blame on a different industry in order to save face, most people would agree that social media at the very least contributes to the problem and makes it worse even if it isn’t the sole reason why the problem might exist in the first place.
The main issue that is being faced by Amazon in particular has to do with the “Amazon’s Choice” badge. This is a badge that a product or brand would receive if it gets enough good reviews, and the main purpose of the badge is to make it so that people can parse the good brands from the bad ones so that they can end up having a more trustworthy transactional experience. The problem that social media poses here is that a lot of the fake reviews that have allowed service providers to illicitly be able to put this badge up even though the quality of service they provide is not up to the mark.
In the first quarter of 2020, Amazon apparently reported 300 different groups that were generating fake reviews, and in spite of the large number it took social media platforms around 45 days to fix the issue on average. Even though it has been a year since that instance, social media companies apparently still take around five days to fix these issues which is a really long time when you think about how many fake reviews can be generated in a very short timespan.
What’s more is that the number of groups that were generating fake reviews has gone up in the past year. Whereas 300 groups were reported a year ago, in the first quarter of 2021 this number went up to 1,000. Hence, even though the time that social media companies require to address these issues has come down, the number of cases has more than tripled and the resolution time is still far too high to be efficient enough.
Companies like Facebook have come under quite a bit of fire for facilitating abuse of other platforms and not doing enough to curb this kind of behavior or activity, and it is high time that someone or the other takes action against them to prevent them from destabilizing the ecommerce industry. We might soon start seeing Amazon change the way it interacts with social media platforms entirely.
Read next: These Are the Trends Influencing Game Design Across Multiple Consoles
While there are definitely a lot of factors that impact the prevalence of fake reviews, according to Amazon the main culprit that should be blamed here is social media. While this could be seen as one tech company placing the blame on a different industry in order to save face, most people would agree that social media at the very least contributes to the problem and makes it worse even if it isn’t the sole reason why the problem might exist in the first place.
The main issue that is being faced by Amazon in particular has to do with the “Amazon’s Choice” badge. This is a badge that a product or brand would receive if it gets enough good reviews, and the main purpose of the badge is to make it so that people can parse the good brands from the bad ones so that they can end up having a more trustworthy transactional experience. The problem that social media poses here is that a lot of the fake reviews that have allowed service providers to illicitly be able to put this badge up even though the quality of service they provide is not up to the mark.
In the first quarter of 2020, Amazon apparently reported 300 different groups that were generating fake reviews, and in spite of the large number it took social media platforms around 45 days to fix the issue on average. Even though it has been a year since that instance, social media companies apparently still take around five days to fix these issues which is a really long time when you think about how many fake reviews can be generated in a very short timespan.
What’s more is that the number of groups that were generating fake reviews has gone up in the past year. Whereas 300 groups were reported a year ago, in the first quarter of 2021 this number went up to 1,000. Hence, even though the time that social media companies require to address these issues has come down, the number of cases has more than tripled and the resolution time is still far too high to be efficient enough.
Companies like Facebook have come under quite a bit of fire for facilitating abuse of other platforms and not doing enough to curb this kind of behavior or activity, and it is high time that someone or the other takes action against them to prevent them from destabilizing the ecommerce industry. We might soon start seeing Amazon change the way it interacts with social media platforms entirely.
Read next: These Are the Trends Influencing Game Design Across Multiple Consoles
