Firefox will have a built-in ‘fake reviews detector’ — Amazon is in trouble

Can we please stop with the browser bloat? This is something that should be a plug-in, not a kitchen sink feature.

I bought an 4.7 rated amplifier on Amazon that broke the first day. Looking at the reviews closer, I noticed they were 100% paid reviewers.

When I tried to leave a negative review, Amazon stopped me, giving a generic message about fake reviews on this product. This product is still out their with a high rating and no way for actual purchasers like me to warn other customers.

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Why would this hurt Amazon? People will just see a different set of reviews. It's manufacturers if crappy knock-off products that should be shaking in their boots.

I’m skeptical… how are the fake reviews identified and how do you avoid flagging real ones?

I just want native vertical tabs lmao

Amazon is in trouble

I don't see why. Fake reviews don't benefit Amazon. The review information is a value-add for them, and fake reviews detract from that.

Hell, if it actually is able to reliably detect fake reviews on Amazon -- which I doubt, but let's roll with it -- Amazon might buy the company that does the fake review detection to get it so that they can filter it.

This will work for 15 microseconds before people start deploying it as an adversarial training aid.

The dedicated websites to check amazon reviews like fakespot.com have been almost completely beaten. What is Firefox going to do differently?

So how much do I have to pay to boost the Fakespot rating of my product listing?

I must admit that I do like the built in page translation, which I guess was made by a similar team using ML and all. Maybe I will like this too? Feels a bit... niche. Maybe it's a stepping stone to any misinformation at some point?

Edit This actually might not be coming as a browser feature at all. Mozilla is trying to increase the size of their Mozilla.ai team, so perhaps it's really looking for people with AI knowledge with web tech and a track record of using it for a ethical purpose. This team would be well placed to build pretty much any AI based tool for the firefox ecosystem.

It is very nice to see Mozilla doing quite useful/helpful projects from time to time.

We're switching to Firefox!

I'm curious to see what Mozilla will do with the shopping assistant portion. Lots of browser extensions, and potentially even some of the Mozilla sponsors offer these types of features, and if Mozilla just stamps them out all at once by integrating that feature, it might lose them some financial support.

On the other hand, I do hope they don't start amassing huge amounts of training data from their uses. It would be a real bummer to not have a decent browser option anymore.

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Does anyone know the split of Amazon's mobile app versus mobile web and desktop use? This won't have an impact on their proprietary app and that's a shame.

Always sort by 1 star. And if the comments share similar issues. Do not buy.

And so it begins, the marketing world has got its claws in AI.

I've been using fakespot for a few months now and it seems hit or miss a lot of times. I'm hoping that Mozilla has been making changes to improve the implementation of how it checks reviews.

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Might be easier to just disable reviews on Amazon if you’re trying to block fake reviews lol.

Amazon's not "in trouble" because they're not fake reviews. They're real reviews left by purchasers, which get bribed to leave them in most cases.

With the amount of false posts all over the web I cannot wait.

So, this sounds like just another AI-authorship detector, which haven't been very successful so far.

I’m confused. Teachers/professors have said that using AI to detect papers written by AI is highly unreliable. How can this work effectively with a much smaller sample of text to work with (even when it looks for “similarities” between multiple reviews)? What happens in a week when Amazon starts writing fake reviews in different tones/“voices”/styles that are intentionally difficult or impossible to compare?

Its not a technology issue so I dont think amazon will be in trouble at all

I'm literally the only person I know that does reviews on amazon.

That's including a circle of a dozen plus relatives I'm friendly enough with to make small talk, three good friends, my wife, my disability/chronic pain support group, the volunteer group I take part in, and a handful of online friends.

Like, you'd think one other person would get bored in the middle of the night and do reviews of stuff that they buy.

But there's always a shit ton of ai generated or copy/paste dreck you have to wade through to get to real people, and even then they may be shills or have been paid to change a review (no shit, I've been offered double and triple the original cost to change bad reviews).

I guess this is the approach to how AI can be used effectively.

This is nothing to get excited about. Like so many other things there will be constant innovations on both sides. It's an arms race between the scammers and the scam detectors.

We literally just want passkeys and native PWA's (add-ons do not count), and an interface optimized for Android tablets. And I refuse to use Firefox again until these things are added.

This is incredibly out of scope for a browser feature set.

Looks like it's an another job for big daddy EU to take care of.

Good. But remember when Firefox was supposed to be a lean alternative to other browsers? I remember.

I would switch to Firefox the instant they let me group my tabs. This fragile stability I get with my browser is embarrassingly important to managing my ADHD.

I think aliexpress is pretty good with reviews. I don't see obvious fakes, and a lot of people leave pictures, which is the only things that really matter.

That makes me want to use firefox less.

I don't need a nanny-control to tell me what's fake and what's real.

ugh, stop adding bloat to my browser. I don't want your shitty shopping assistant Mozilla as much as I don't want it in Edge or Chrome. Once extension support in Epiphany is good enough for KeePassXC I'm switching away from Firefox entirely...

Why doesn't mozilla stop adding politically correct shit like this no one asked instead of tab groups and other features?