Re:Amazon is filled with fake reviews and it’s getting harde...
by ilamont on Sunday September 06, 2020 @04:46PM
(#24394529)
> humans can't tell if a review is fake from the text very well, but other things like an excessive number of 5* reviews is easy for a human to see
Shouldn't an excessive number of 5* reviews also be easy for a machine to see, especially when other indicators are considered?
For most Amazon detail pages I visit, I immediately sort by most recent. I have learned that the most relevant (which tend to correlate with earlier posting dates) are most likely to be fake, sometimes obviously so.
Doing so is Fakespot's raison d'etre, but an unimportant side gig for Amazon. I did my MSc thesis on classifying fake reviews (https://douglas-fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html). It focused on purely text based features, but I am familiar with all of the literature and research at this point.
Non-text based features are more useful (classification based just on text is hard because believable fake reviews are easy to write) but the amount of non-text / behavioral data Amazon gets or would need to process would be a Facebook level of engineering effort - and is it really that cost-effective? (versus letting buyers do the work - humans can't tell if a review is fake from the text very well, but other things like an excessive number of 5* reviews is easy for a human to see)
The removal of these 20,000 reviews (the FT article) is based on a straightforward obvious heuristic and so is cost-effective. But trying to track all the IPs from China leaving reviews? hmmm. But they should have got the distance and banned all the companies associated with the fake reviews; that would definitely send a signal.
Amazon has tried things like Vine etc to deal with the problem; Yelp and TripAdvisor have their own methodologies. But bad actors always seem to find a way around it. Automating the monitoring of communities where spammer groups congregate is possible but that is another major engineering effort - you just can't have humans doing it due to the scale (and Bezos doesn't like paying essential warehouse workers a decent wage either... so why bother with something like this?)