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Re:Amazon is filled with fake reviews and it’s getting harde... by dfraser992 on Sunday September 06, 2020 @04:06PM (#24394255)
> "more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably." ...

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?)

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.

Re:Amazon is filled with fake reviews and it’s getting harde... by srtjstjsj on Sunday September 06, 2020 @07:40PM (#24395557)
Vine generates real-ish reviews. It doesn't stop fake reviews.