There may be differing opinions about the health benefits of vitamin supplements, but there’s no debate among medical experts that eating sawdust is bad for you. Yet sawdust is exactly what Saoud Khalifah found in vitamin supplements he ordered online from a globally popular shopping site. How could this have happened, he wondered? Khalifah started digging and discovered an overwhelming number of unreliable product reviews on many of the world’s biggest eCommerce sites.
That revelation back in 2016 inspired Khalifah to assemble a team and develop Fakespot — an extension that utilizes generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to analyze the reliability of product reviews. Fakespot can analyze reviews on Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, Sephora, eBay and Shopify-powered sites, with coverage for more shopping platforms in the pipeline. Sensing an opportunity for great collaboration, the Fakespot team joined Mozilla last year to further advance its mission to arm users with information about product reviews and pursue other GenAI projects.
Fakespot Fake Amazon Reviews and eBay Sellers
Protect yourself from bad sellers and fake reviews on Amazon and more!
Rob Gross, Fakespot Senior Manager, explains that part of what makes Fakespot so effective are the seven years experience their team has accrued deploying “state-of-the-art AI and constantly improving our platform to find emerging problematic patterns and stop them before they spread.”
When unreliable product reviews started to emerge en masse online about a decade ago, they were the written work of actual people employed at “fake review farms” and still are today. But now the “fake review farms” and others have the power of GenAI to help them mass produce reviews, which compounds the complexity and scale of this phenomenon. However the root problem remains the same. “The issue with GenAI-derived reviews have the same issues as human-generated ones,” explains Gross. “They have patterns that Fakespot can detect and we are constantly working to update our engines to detect new and emerging forms of potential consumer deception.
Give yourself a fighting chance against a rising tide of unreliable reviews and try Fakespot. It’s intuitive, easy to use, and improves all the time.