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A comment on FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website. Parent comment

Re:FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an... by Unklejoe on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @08:36AM (#19263111)
> How can one be sure those subreddits don't have any paid posters?

My guess is that they eventually will (and I'm sure some already do). However, one thing that kind of helps weed out the fake reviews is the fact that you can inspect a user's post history.

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Re:FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an... by Paul-ish on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @10:45AM (#19263906)
You can see a reviewers review history on Amazon.
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Re:FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an... by function_seven on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @01:10PM (#19265451)
Yeah, but that's just reviews.

On reddit or other more general sites, you can see their entire comment history. Hopefully you'll notice that a tiny tiny portion of their comments are related to products or reviews.

In other words, you can get a feel for if the person is genuine or not.

Of course, that doesn't 100% rule out paid shilling by (otherwise) honest people, but you do get a much better sense of the veracity of reviews on a site like reddit than you could ever get from Amazon.

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