The Federal Trade Commission says it wants to "level the playing field for honest companies" with a crackdown on fake online reviews. The FTC has proposed new rules that include heavy penalties for companies using dodgy reviews to boost their products, the Washington Post reports. Offenders could be fined $50,000 for each time a customer sees a fake review. Surveys show the vast majority of people shopping online consult reviews, but according to some estimates, around a third of all online reviews are fake, NPR reports.
"Anyone who's done any shopping online knows that trying to actually get objective information about the product is so fraught because there's so much commercial misinformation, so many deceptive reviews," says Samuel Levine, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, per the Post. The proposed new rules ban reviews from somebody who hasn't used a product, along with AI-generated reviews, TechCrunch reports. The rules would also crack down on middlemen who sell good reviews—and on companies that try to suppress bad reviews with threats of legal action. The FTC also aims to stamp out review "hijacking," in which a company takes a page with legitimate good reviews and swaps in a different product.
Businesses will be required to disclose when an employee has written a review. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Yelp have been trying to cut the number of fake reviews, but the spread of AI is expected to make the problem much worse, the Verge reports. "The widespread emergence of AI chatbots is likely to make it easier for bad actors to write fake reviews," the FTC proposal states. (More online review stories.)
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