The FTC orders Sitejabber to stop faking product reviews

The Federal Trade Commission has charged Sitejabber, an online review platform, with violating its new fake reviews rules by using point-of-sale reviews to misrepresent what customers think about products. In one of its first enforcement actions under new rules banning companies from making or selling fake reviews, the FTC is ordering the company to stop.

The FTC says Sitejabber “deceptively” punched up businesses’ review counts by incorporating responses to point-of-sale questionnaires asking customers to rate and review their shopping experience, before they’d actually gotten any products or services. It also alleges that by giving its clients tools to publish that feedback on their own sites, Sitejabber enabled them to mislead people to think the ratings and reviews were based on actual experience with what the companies were selling.

The FTC now forbids Sitejabber from “misrepresenting, or assisting anyone else in misrepresenting” that such reviews are based on customer experience with a product or service. The company is also barred from helping other companies misrepresent the reviews that “it collects, moderates, or displays.”

The regulator’s new anti-fake review rules, which went into effect last month, aim to address AI-generated reviews online, including on Amazon and other e-commerce sites. The FTC prohibits a swath of deceptive practices, such as offering incentives to leave feedback or creating a fake review website that seems independent but is actually owned by the very company that makes the products being reviewed. Or at least, it will for the next couple of months, after which the next US President will be sworn in and (probably) replace its leadership — and we’ll see what happens next.