Create a trustworthy customer review experience

Amazon has always been committed to the customer-first philosophy, providing customers with a wide selection of products, favorable prices and fast delivery. We achieve this vision by providing products that meet customer needs and win the trust of customers, sellers and brands. Among them, customer reviews are a key part of the shopping experience, helping customers make purchasing decisions while helping our sellers stand out from similar products. Amazon has more than 300 million active users and more than 1.9 million sellers worldwide, most of which are small and medium-sized enterprises. Most of the sales of physical goods in the Amazon Mall come from sellers. Amazon continues to innovate on behalf of customers and sellers to ensure that real customer reviews are displayed in our mall.

When Amazon first started displaying customer reviews, some people didn’t quite understand why Amazon wanted to highlight both positive and negative reviews for these products in its store. For us, the answer is simple - Amazon is committed to providing customers with a consistent and enjoyable shopping experience. Authentic reviews can help customers make the right purchasing decisions and get the products they really need. Therefore, it is particularly important that the reviews accurately reflect the customer’s previous experience with the product.

To earn the trust of customers and honest sellers in our marketplace, Amazon has invested heavily in preventing fake or incentivized reviews from appearing on the marketplace. Over the years, we have continued to innovate, deploy, and enhance leading machine learning-based technologies, supplemented by expert investigators, to proactively prevent customers from seeing fake reviews on Amazon's marketplace through a combination of technology and humans. We know we're not perfect yet, so we also provide customers and sellers with a way to report fake reviews. In 2020, we blocked more than 200 million suspected fake reviews before customers saw them, of which more than 99% were actively monitored and removed by us. In addition to removing these reviews, we will also prevent accounts that posted false reviews from submitting further reviews, and take action against seller accounts that gain commercial benefits from false reviews.

Amazon works tirelessly to protect our marketplace. We will take action to stop fake reviews, no matter the size of the bad actors’ business or where in the world they are located. At the same time, we want to emphasize that Amazon does not make decisions to remove selling privileges lightly , and we work hard to ensure a high level of accuracy when identifying fake reviews. We understand that every seller is hard at work building and operating a business, and that they have a responsibility to their employees while providing a great shopping experience for customers. We work hard to avoid misjudging good sellers and to stop bad actors who seek to gain business benefits through unfair means. Amazon is aware of the burden it shoulders, and all of these efforts are to ensure that sellers can grow their businesses in a fair and healthy competitive environment, and that customers can shop with confidence. We will also continue to innovate to improve our proactive monitoring capabilities and prevent fake reviews from affecting customers and sellers.

As we continue to improve our ability to monitor fake reviews and the accounts that buy and sell them, we are also seeing more bad actors trying to solicit fake reviews through channels outside of Amazon, particularly social media. Some bad actors solicit fake reviews themselves through social media, while others hire third-party service providers. Moreover, bad actors regularly conduct these transactions outside of Amazon and conduct related transactions through multiple accounts in an attempt to evade detection. In view of this, we have also adopted many leading technologies, including advanced machine learning technology, to monitor the connections between different entities engaged in these transactions, including customer accounts, seller accounts, products and brands. Obviously, these require the joint efforts of the entire industry to achieve faster progress.

When we detect fake reviews outside of Amazon, we regularly communicate with social media companies about bad behavior on their platforms. In the first three months of 2020, we provided leads to more than 300 bad groups, and social media companies took an average of 45 days to shut down these groups on their platforms. In the first three months of this year, we provided leads to more than 1,000 bad groups, and social media companies took an average of 5 days to shut down these groups. We are encouraged to see that many social media companies are becoming more responsive, but if we want to address this problem at scale, we hope that social media companies will invest in proactive controls to detect and stop these bad behaviors in advance. Protecting consumers requires us to work together and leverage our unique industry knowledge to stop any potential fraud and abuse before it affects customers and sellers.

It is also important that we hold these bad actors and the service providers that provide fake reviews accountable. This is also a serious industry challenge we face. We have filed lawsuits against bad actors who purchase reviews and the service providers who facilitate them, and will continue to pursue bad actors through legal means. Fake reviews mislead consumers, create unfair competition for sellers, and breed a gray industry chain. Therefore, we need the concerted assistance of consumer protection regulators around the world.

Amazon will continue to strengthen proactive controls, increase industry collaboration by optimizing processes and tools, and hold bad actors accountable for their actions. We call on all social media companies, if their services are used to facilitate false reviews, to actively participate in and proactively combat false reviews, and work with us to stop these bad actors, ensuring that consumers can shop with confidence and sellers can compete fairly.

We believe that protecting customers and honest sellers lies in continued innovation, industry collaboration, and bringing bad actors to justice.