Amazon co-founds cross-industry consumer review safeguard group

Amazon is partnering with several online consumer-facing platforms to help ensure consumer reviews are real and trustworthy.

The e-tailer, which follows its own internal three-step plan to halt phony reviews and says it proactively blocked over 200 million suspected fake reviews from its stores in 2022, is teaming up with Booking.com, Expedia Group, Glassdoor, Tripadvisor and Trustpilot up to launch the global Coalition for Trusted Reviews.

[Read more: Amazon targets fake reviews with new lawsuits]

This cross-industry collaboration is designed to protect access to trustworthy consumer reviews worldwide. Together, members will define best practices for hosting online reviews and sharing methods of fake review detection, with the goal of stopping fake reviews at the source. 

The founding companies met in October 2022 in San Francisco at the first ever Fake Reviews Conference, organized by Tripadvisor. The group has agreed to engage in several key areas to help prevent fake reviews, including:

Industry alignment: Developing common standards and definitions for use throughout the industry around what constitutes a fake review and other content moderation nomenclature and measurement.

Best practice sharing: Defining best practices for hosting online reviews and sharing information on updated content moderation processes and methods of fake review detection.

Information sharing: Sharing information relating to how fraudulent actors operate, such as companies selling fake reviews to businesses seeking to improperly improve their online reputations.
 
Advocacy: Engaging with academics and public policy leaders to promote the benefits to consumers of review content and support industry efforts to combat fake reviews from being published.

Members of the Coalition for Trusted Reviews will next meet in Brussels, Belgium in December 2023 at the second Fake Reviews Conference, organized by Amazon.

“Customer reviews are an important part of the shopping experience, and the goal of this coalition is to ensure every review reflects customers’ actual experiences,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon VP of worldwide selling partner services, in a corporate blog post. “Amazon is aggressively fighting fake review brokers to protect our customers and selling partners, but these fraudsters are a global problem, impacting multiple industry sectors. Through greater collaboration and sharing across industries, including information on fraudsters’ tactics and how they operate, we can more effectively shut down fraudulent review activity, deter other bad actors from attempting to game our systems, and protect more consumers.”