Amazon’s Token Crackdown: Fake Reviews, Real Power Play
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently secured a promise from Amazon to do more about fake reviews.
At first it sounds reassuring. After all, crowdsourced star ratings influence an estimated £23 billion a year in consumer spending.
If Amazon cleans up the mess, shoppers supposedly get more confidence in their purchases.
That’s the official line. But anyone who’s been paying attention knows better.
Amazon’s announcement is just another instance of an international megacorporation scrambling to protect its image, not its customers.
If eliminating fake reviews were truly a priority, the company wouldn’t have waited until the CMA dragged them into compliance.
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According to Amazon, more than 99% of products on its platform contain only “authentic reviews.”
The same statement also admitted it blocked 275 million fake reviews in 2024 alone.
That contradiction is the tell. If hundreds of millions of fake reviews slip into the system every year, the margin of error is far larger than Amazon wants to admit.
And let’s not forget “catalogue abuse.” That’s when unscrupulous sellers take glowing reviews from a legitimate product and paste them onto an unrelated knockoff.
Amazon says they’ll sanction offenders. But the real question is why such basic fraud was allowed to fester on a platform that prides itself on “machine learning” sophistication.
The answer is simple: So long as those counterfeit stars drove conversions and revenue, the platform had no incentive to act.
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It took a new UK law, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, to push Amazon into promising change.
Now the CMA can fine companies, ban sellers, or order redress without dragging cases through court.
In other words, Amazon’s hand was forced. It’s pure damage control.
Notice what happens when watchdogs turn their spotlight away. Google made similar pledges earlier this year, but its review system remains rife with manipulation. These corporate commitments only ever arrive under duress, and they fade the second enforcement relaxes.
The deeper problem is that consumers place blind trust in systems designed for exploitation. About 90% of UK shoppers rely on reviews before buying. Yet they rarely stop to ask who controls the flow of information, or how fragile their confidence really is.
Back during the internet boom of the 90s, economists dismissed the concept of online sales. Hard as it is to believe now, the experts said e-commerce could never happen because without the ability to try out, or at least see, the product, customers wouldn’t trust sellers enough to buy from them sight-unseen.
Amazon’s star-ranking review system is credited with overcoming that consumer risk and bringing us online commerce as we know it.
The result? A handful of tech monopolies including Amazon, Google, and Apple stand between buyer and seller. They control products’ and sellers’ visibility and reputations. And they even dictate what qualifies as “trustworthy.”
Whether reviews are real or fake, the underlying system remains weighted in the house’s favor.
So what’s the way forward?
It’s not vandalism, not protest, and not even regulation.
Because all of those methods play within the megacorps’ territory.
Consumers can only win by leaving the casino. That means resisting the urge to trust crowdsourced opinion curated by opaque algorithms. It also means buying directly from creators whenever possible, even if it’s less convenient.
Most of all, it means recognizing that the glossy promise of efficiency hides a psyop designed, yet again, to manipulate behavior in service of shareholders, not customers.
But don’t think you can fix Amazon.
Nothing but decisive government action can.
What you can do is restore one asset Amazon can’t counterfeit: your integrity.
Weigh the cost carefully before feeding the machine.
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Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.