29 points

Along with prohibiting reviews written by nonhumans, the FTC’s rule also forbids companies from paying for either positive or negative reviews to falsely boost or denigrate a product. It also forbids marketers from exaggerating their own influence by, for example, paying for bots to inflate their follower count.

Violations of the rule could result in fines being issued for each violation, according to the rule. This means that for an e-commerce site with hundreds of thousands of reviews, penalties for fake or manipulated reviews could quickly add up.

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28 points

So how are they going to detect, proof, and enforce?

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14 points

unclear (they don’t tend to announce enforcement mechanisms in these and it’s not a final rule until it’s a final rule), but it’s not like the FTC is lacking in power as an agency

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5 points

Well, that is until the Chevron decision got knocked down.

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12 points

Probably by taking down the companies doing it rather than the people using them. Just set up an account and ask around for where to buy some likes.

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1 point
*

Does that counts as emtrapment?

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4 points

Entrapment is enticing someone to do something they wouldn’t do otherwise.

If you ask someone where to buy drugs, and they give you the name of their dealer, you’re not entrapping the dealer since they normally sell drugs.

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6 points

How long before Trump publicly rants about this?

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11 points

i’m honestly not sure Trump knows anything about the FTC, and if his campaign was smart these are the kinds of things they’d propose instead of “IVF should be illegal but also you’re a degenerate for not having children”

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6 points
*

I can already see it: “They’re gonna give everyone healthcare, they’re gonna jail review scammers, they’re gonna let anyone join a union. The monsters.”

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17 points

Extremely based, good job FTC

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20 points

Their heart is in the right place, but good luck doing anything about it

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16 points

Gotta start somewhere I guess. And it’s a path in the right direction, at least.

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1 point

it’s not hard to find them when they’re selling fake reviews as a service

The article teaser beginning should make that clear as well

Amazon sued more than 10,000 Facebook group administrators in July 2022

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