Amazon Lawsuit Targets Facebook Groups Over Fake Reviews – CNET [CNET]

More than 10,000 Facebook groups were included in the lawsuit for allegedly recruiting individuals to “post incentivized and misleading reviews.”

In its latest effort to crack down on fake reviews, Amazon has taken legal action against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups, the company said in a press release Tuesday. The e-commerce giant alleges that the Facebook group administrators named in the lawsuit recruited and incentivized people to write misleading reviews on Amazon stores in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan in exchange for money or free products. 

“Our teams stop millions of suspicious reviews before they’re ever seen by customers, and this lawsuit goes a step further to uncover perpetrators operating on social media,” Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services, said in the release. “Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways we protect customers by holding bad actors accountable.”

Facebook parent company Meta earlier this year took down a group with over 43,000 members, and has taken down thousands more since 2020, according to Amazon.

“Groups that solicit or encourage fake reviews violate our policies and are removed,” Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever said in an emailed statement to CNET. “We are working with Amazon on this matter and will continue to partner across the industry to address spam and fake reviews.”

More to come.