The UK\u2019s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is probing whether Amazon and Google broke consumer laws by failing to take action against fake reviews on their sites, the agency announced Friday. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are investigating concerns that Amazon and Google have not been doing enough to prevent or remove fake reviews to protect customers and honest businesses,\u201d Andrea Coscelli, the CMA\u2019s chief executive, said in a statement. \u201cOur worry is that millions of online shoppers could be misled by reading fake reviews and then spending their money based on those recommendations.\u201d She added that it was unfair to businesses that adhere to the rules if other businesses can give their own products fake 5-star reviews. <\/p>\n
An Amazon spokesperson said in an email to The Verge<\/em> on Friday that the company devotes \u201csignificant resources to preventing fake or incentivized reviews\u201d from appearing on its platform, adding that the company works to ensure reviews accurately reflect a customer\u2019s experience with a product. \u201cWe will continue to assist the CMA with its enquiries and we note its confirmation that no findings have been made against our business,\u201d the spokesperson said. <\/p>\n In a June 16th blog post, Amazon said some \u201cbad actors\u201d were using external platforms to buy and sell fake reviews, and it blamed social media companies it said had been slow to act in flagging fake reviews on their own platforms \u2014 although it noted the response time had improved somewhat over the last year. <\/p>\n \u201cWhile we appreciate that some social media companies have become much faster at responding, to address this problem at scale, it is imperative for social media companies to invest adequately in proactive controls to detect and enforce fake reviews ahead of our reporting the issue to them,\u201d the blog post reads.<\/p>\n Amazon recently removed several gadget brands\u2019 storefronts from its site following a Wall Street Journal<\/em> investigation into fake reviews.<\/p>\n A Google spokesperson said in an email to The Verge<\/em> on Friday that it has strict policies that clearly state that reviews must be based on real experiences, \u201cand when we find policy violations, we take action\u2014 from removing abusive content to disabling user accounts.\u201d<\/p>\n Once it concludes its investigation, the CMA can take enforcement action if it finds Amazon or Google broke UK consumer protection laws, which could range from getting commitments from the tech firms to change how they handle fake reviews to possible court action. The CMA noted that, at this stage, it \u201chas not reached a view\u201d on whether the companies broke any laws.<\/p>\n The investigation is the UK regulator\u2019s latest attempt to scrutinize fake reviews on US tech platforms. In April, Facebook removed 16,000 groups that were trading fake reviews after the CMA raised concerns. <\/p>\n \n \n \n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The UK\u2019s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is probing whether Amazon and Google broke…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1687,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[38,64,62,66,63,65,69,67,71,68,70],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1921,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685\/revisions\/1921"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}