Might be worth checking out ReviewMeta - it scans Amazon product reviews for unnatural review patterns and provides a report highlighting suspicious activity. They also offer a browser extension.
I’ve been happy with the “ReviewMeta” chrome extension, which evaluates the product reviews on any amazon site, and displays a score indicating how likely it is the ratings have been manipulated. It shows examples of flagged reviews which can be pretty funny.
Chrome lets you limit extension permissions by domain, so I don’t worry about it snooping on the rest of my browsing.
But you’re right about brands. When it comes to certain products like phone chargers, the manipulation is so rampant I stick with the same supplier.
Since I haven't seen it posted yet, an invaluable tool for sifting through fake vs real Amazon reviews is fakespot.com. They use AI to score every product and crawl an item's review tree (reviews left by the same people for other products) to verify the authenticity of individual reviewers. I've sifted out a lot of shady products AND sellers using this. (I'm not affiliated in any way with them.)
I’d recommend using https://reviewmeta.com. It filters out suspicious reviewers and makes it much easier to avoid products with bought reviews on Amazon. Wouldn’t make purchases there without it.
FakeSpot and ReviewMeta are up on different tabs every time I buy something new on Amazon, and they do a pretty good job of alerting you to scammy reviews without any internal Amazon info. I can’t imagine it’s not something an internal team could make a serious dent in.
I'd imagine that it can't be too hard on Amazon's side to predict whether a product receives a lot of fake reviews or not. Just checking if the reviewer has other reviews would be a simple first step to grab the low-hanging fruit.
Amazon is a huge search engine. They should act like one and prevent attempts of gaming the system.
Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books.
What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?
I did my dissertation on this very topic (coming soon to my website... at some point). I do not know what tactics or systems Amazon has that deal with fake reviews, or if they even really bother beyond the easy wins like tracking IPs. My dissertation was on textual analysis, which is the hard part - the other signals like IP and behavioral related ones (like # of reviews posted in one day) are more fruitful.
The heuristic you seem to be using is a logical one, but requires more data analysis than Amazon might be willing to put effort into. Looking at these reviews, they are... well, so many on the same day is suspicious. My first theory is that some fake review writing company got tasked with flooding Amazon, and so reviews got farmed out to writers. Or someone has invented a GAN that writes good reviews, or at least a good first draft. I'd have to analyze the data to have more of an opinion. But yeah, verified purchaser means little.
The real question is, how economical it is for Amazon to really care about fake reviews? Buyer beware etc and there are more than enough scams running on Amazon / EBay / etc that I'm sure they're just treading water all the time. They have sued review writing outfits, so they care somewhat, but only after the problem got written up in enough newspapers... It is a hard job, trying to analyze all the data coming into their systems each day. I'm not sure any company has really implemented a lot of the research I read about in my literature survey.
I left this comment on the site's comment section (apologies if others have already posted these suggestions - I didn't read through all the comments):
Try using fakespot.com or reviewmeta.com. They're both sites setup to try & check the validity of Amazon comments using different methodology - such as how many times a reviewer has left a review, certain trigger keywords known to be used by bots & how many reviews Amazon has deleted from a review by request of the merchant (yes, Amazon will do this!). This will leave you with a much better sense of whether or not a product has been 'review-bombed' or if the company is up to shady practices.
I've taken to keeping a copy of Fakespot[0] open in an incognito browser and regularly submit Amazon URLs to it. Over the past month or so, I've looked at everything from headphones to shampoo and been boggled at the amount of rigging that goes on.
While I can't say for sure that their algorithms are always spot on, they give some interesting feedback in terms of recent review count history, price history, whether Amazon has recently bulk deleted reviews, and some heuristic comment quality ratings. So often I've found that Amazon's Choice is questionable: 4.8 stars, hundreds of reviews within the last 30 days on a slickly packaged, no-name electronics gadget is all too common.
Typically, I use Fakespot to look for red flags, flip back to the reviews area on Amazon, sort them by Most Recent Reviews, and dig around. I don't use the Fakespot Chrome extension, though. Too invasive for my tastes.
There's a huge burst of product reviews from Nov. 21st, all from 'verified' purchases, all from accounts with a female first name and exactly 3 product reviews.
Is this the current state of the art in fake amazon reviews? How can they not be detecting this as anomalous? Is there a semi-reliable way of detecting this kind of thing or do I have to be insanely vigilant all the time?
Or is it just a coincidence, and I'm being too paranoid?
FakeSpot and ReviewMeta seem to do a decent job of identifying obviously fake Amazon reviews.
I suspect that Amazon just have an incentives problem - purging their site of fake five-star reviews would go a long way to restoring trust in their platform, but it would negatively impact sales in the short-term. From what I've heard, Amazon has a very decentralised and data-driven management culture, which is antithetical to the short-term pain/long-term gain implicit in fixing their reviews problem.
I'd suspect they are looking into this for their reviews. There are many, many websites that screenscrape the amazon reviews, and try to make you think they were from that site instead.
I also agree that it should be very easy for Amazon to pick up on. I can't believe it's happening. We call this "Review Hijacking" and have a warning that appears at the top of our report if we detect it: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/
This is why I use tools like fakespot and reviewmeta to make sure Amazons reviews are somewhat accurate. Sure, it's not fool proof, but these tools attempt to filter the obvious bad reviews.
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