Firefox will have a built-in ‘fake reviews detector’

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

I actually don't agree, and the reason is - non tech people. You and me can install plugins but ordinary people don't do that. So the default experience must be good, offering improvements to the experience over Google Chrome.

Otherwise all privacy features could also be plugins. Imagine if that was true. Firefox would have no identity and you would have to install plugins and make it your own.

So some features should be built in. Maybe the ability to get pop-ups about false reviews will actually make users go "wow that is so useful".
- Compromise: Develop it as a Plugin and then install it by default. That way people who don't want the feature can easily remove it completely. That approach would likely also reduce the number of Firefox forks whose sole purpose is to remove the new features some consider bloat.
- Now, let's talk about adblockers... Oh, wait, Google would get upset if FF had an inbuilt adblocker and could stop giving us those $weet money...
- ....you would have to install plugins and make it your own.
  
  Reminds me of gnome.
Agreed. This is well outside the scope of native browser functions. Firefox already has a rich extensions ecosystem. They can just include the extension with the browser by default for all I care, but as a native feature, this makes no sense.
- They do that. Screenshot upload and so on are handled as extensions.
- Firefox extension platform frontend is a mess and has been for years.
I'd say these should be "recommended plug-ins" but imho FF/Moz embarassed themselves on that front with the whole "Pocket" thing.
I agree and I worry about what options they'll remove from about:config next to make room for or force the acceptance of new features like they have a habit of doing.
- There's LibreWolf. It allows you to disable many things that you can't disable in normal Firefox. It also has uBlock Origin pre-installed and it's pre-configured for privacy.
+1. When Edge added a price tracker / financing thing, the same people threw a fit.

If you were pro that, you should be pro this.
Just use LibreWolf if you want debloated Firefox
- Librewolf isn't just a debloated version of Firefox. It's built with a completely different goal of being extra locked down for privacy. More so than the defaults of Firefox. Also, it doesn't even include auto update functionality unless you're using a package manager.
Amazon only operates in 58 countries, so it's basically useless for everyone else. But the company they acquired (fakespot) seems to do more than amazon, but that still does not make it worth packaging it with the browser

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.

That's appalling customer service.

Amazon stopped me, giving a generic message about fake reviews on this product

Can you elaborate? I've never experienced this and would like to understand how they do it.
- I've had this multiple times.
  
  Tried to leave a big detailed helpful negative review and it gets flagged for being suspicious, with no copy of the review attached so I have to write it all again. And then it gets removed again.
  
  I just looked in my emails. The exact phrasing was "We have reviewed our decisions and concluded that the product you received is authentic. As a result, we removed your review specific to this product. This ensures other customers see reviews that reflect the current shopping experience."
  
  Most recently it happened with a body trimmer, where I never questioned the inauthenticity, and then a zojirushi travel mug that I genuinely believe was a fake, and attached a lot of evidence.
- They've blocked my review on a shower chair that was absolutely not rated for what they said. I nearly fell on my butt and my skinnier partner said it was too wobbly. They've blocked the negative review 5 times saying I questioned the authenticity of the product and they have confirmed it. I knew it was Medline brand. I've had to file a FTC complaint which I expect to be worthless.
Do you mean Vine? I can tell you a few things about that.
- Yep vines, never paid attention to them until this happened.
  
  Are they all fake or something?

Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with? The far bigger problem is that most reviews are just devoid of useful information. "Thing arrived and box looked pretty" is what most of them boil down to. If they are fake or not doesn't make a difference. Even a review that puts effort into itself, is largely useless when the writer didn't have multiple competing products at hand to compare. And on top of that you have the issue that products will frequently change under the hood, so even if the product was good a year ago, there is no guarantee you are getting the same thing when you order it today.

The whole online shopping landscape is a complete mess and fake reviews are really just the tiny tip of the iceberg. To really improve the situation you'd need some "Consumer Reports"-type effort that objectively evaluates a products performance and compares it to the competition. Depending on random people on the Internet to do the reviewing is kind of a lost cause to begin with.

My favourite is someone who rates it 1 star because they got it late.

You're reviewing the item you wet wipe, not Katie who works for Evri/Hermes...
- If Amazon had visible seller reviews, I would be more inclined to agree.
  
  Then again, if people would actually say who their sellers were, I would be less inclined to agree.
There is also the question section.

"How big is the item itself"

Some idiot: I don't know. Bought it as a gift
Of course they are a problem? The real issue is the star ratings in aggregate of course, but the value in individual reviews is detecting patterns - "didn't like the lock thing" "latch was loose" "maybe it's just me, but the latch didn't feel solid" "the lock broke off within a week". You start to see trouble spots if you know how to skim actual reviews.

So to get that value, you don't restrict input, you leave it open, the "pretty box" people aren't ideal, but it's fine because it allows for the breadcrumbs that tell the larger truth. It's ridiculous to expect normal, busy people to do "consumer reports" style reviews for every small kitchen sponge and packet of stickers sold online?
With Amazon there's also the problem of them combining reviews of entirely different products into a single product's page. I have no idea why they do this. There are also sellers who switch the product on the page while keeping the positive reviews for an earlier product.
- This right here. It should be illegal to do this. I discovered this I think last year and it blew my mind, it's straight up misleading the consumer.
Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with?

For me, the answer is mostly "no" because I just assume everything (except certain name-brand items that I did my homework on elsewhere) on Amazon/Ebay/Aliexpress/etc. is marginally-functional crap and adjust my expectations accordingly.

If anything, the only signals I go by on those sites are the number of ratings and reviews (not their content) as indications of popularity, following the "wisdom of crowds."
Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with?

I feel like this is the case. Whenever I have a new hobby and need to make a purchase, I rely a lot on reviews of others because it's impossible to guarantee the quality of anything. Look at Doc Marten's today, they fucking suck, and this is a "known" brand. Now how about buying all sorts of weird shit from other countries or small companies that aren't well known enough.

Yes for consumers this is a problem.

The whole online shopping landscape is a complete mess and fake reviews are really just the tiny tip of the iceberg. To really improve the situation you’d need some “Consumer Reports”-type effort that objectively evaluates a products performance and compares it to the competition. Depending on random people on the Internet to do the reviewing is kind of a lost cause to begin with.

This would be a welcome solution.
- Isn't that what Which? Magazine does?
Stiftung Warentest is such a thing in Germany.
The far bigger problem is that most reviews are just devoid of useful information. "Thing arrived and box looked pretty" is what most of them boil down to. If they are fake or not doesn't make a difference.

But-But how are we supposed to know how handsome/beautiful the delivery rider who delivered the parcel is???
Photos from people who received the product are useful, you never know with the marketting bs. And I would argue that random people review are important, but they are so bad right now that you got used not to look at them. Of course some will be stupid (1/5, came late), you just have to read them. Which is impossible with the 50.000 fake on every product.
- I like the reviews that say "I've owned this for 20 minutes and it works great!" I assume most reviews are from people who just received the product (because that's when they'll think to write a review) and are therefore pretty useless as a guide to quality.
I love the reviews that say "I haven't gotten it yet but I'm sure it is good" or they review UPS instead "Package arrived damaged". They are as useful as those idiotic unpacking videos.

If I use reviews I look for ones with specific information and what the general range of negative ones are. If there are a mess of negatives ones and they are recent with details included then I pay attention.
Yeah I think it's pretty easy to work around fake reviews. Seems like a skill issue tbh.

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.

And unfortunately Firefox is sitting at 2 to 3% so even if Amazon were dependant on fake reviews, they have little to fear due to the low marketshare.
- I would assume the whole point of a feature like this is to help them get new users.
- Well I'll always use Firefox, no question about it. There is incredible value in using a browser with no alterior motivations, no additional products to sell you, no reason to spy on you.
Amazon makes a lot of money facilitating the sales of counterfeit goods.
- Sure. But they'd make similar amounts of money (possibly more) by selling non-counterfeit goods.
  
  They want their market to be open to third parties, because otherwise those third parties are gonna launch competing platforms. Better if they stick with Amazon, and Amazon gets a cut of the sale. There are thousands and thousands of Chinese companies selling products on Amazon, and many of them are fantastic deals. If Amazon blocks them, they all move to AliExpress, and maybe that really takes off and bites into Amazon's market share.
  
  But when you consider the sheer number of products offered on Amazon, it's hard for them to separate the good-but-cheap from the crap counterfeit bullshit. And as you say...they make money either way, so it's not the highest-priority problem to fix--though as I said in another comment, they are aware that if enough products are crap, people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole, so they've tried different techniques to block bullshit reviews in the past.
  
  But if somebody else wants to put in the work to filter shitty knockoffs from the results page? Well, that's fine with them! They make money selling you the real deal products, too--likely more, because their cut of a more expensive original product is gonna be higher.
Agreed. Might actually give more faith in using Amazon.

Hmm their Amazon basics might suffer. I think Amazon basics true offering is cheap but not scam.
- That was my understanding of why Amazon Basics was started, cheap not garbage to set a floor for prices and try to stop the race to the bottom
Why would this hurt Amazon?

A product with 2002 reviews suddenly has only 2 reviews, and they are not the nicest ones... Whole Amazon with 2002 gazillion reviews suddenly has only 2 gazillion... :-)

Seriously:

I guess they own several of these "companies" where you can buy fake reviews for your product. And now these are facing their revenues sinking.
- Do you have any evidence of that? I used to work for Amazon (as a programmer working on financial data, not delivering packages or anything), and they took review quality pretty damn seriously. They knew full well that customers losing faith in the quality of products on Amazon, it could crater their business.
  
  If some product with 2002 reviews suddenly drops to 2 reviews, 1.5 stars average...it'll sink to the bottom of pages of results, and people will click on a different one, with better reviews. It's not like they only have a couple products to offer, and they make money on more or less all of them.
It won't. It's clickbait. It's dumb.

Edit- tHeY'rE iN TrOuBle isn't clickbait? Fuck off. This might dip into their profits, slightly, but Amazon is hardly in trouble. FFS.

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

They’re just building Fakespot into the browser so the same way Fakespot does, by analyzing the user who posted the review
- What does "analyzing" mean?

I just want native vertical tabs lmao

https://github.com/ranmaru22/firefox-vertical-tabs
I've been using Sidebery with some userchrome to hide the top tabs, and it's a workable solution, but far from ideal.

I also wish keybindings were configurable. For example, with the "/" search, ctrl-g/G to go to next/prev match is really weird
- Tried Sidebery too with some basic hidden UI CSS but having to keep it up to date makes it clunky at times, leagues away from Edges implementation where it's just a toggle away.
what's a vertical tab
- Where the tabs are on the side of the desktop screen instead of the top.
And i just want a tab bar on Android tablets/foldables like every other browser.

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.

I don't agree with the assertion that fake reviews don't benefit them, but I may be missing something. Reviews help drive consumer behavior and more reviews lead to more sales from those who are unable or unwilling to be more discerning. (Amazon takes a cut)

For others, it the idea or presence of fake reviews might drive them to a "trusted" Amazon Basics alternative, also leading to sales with a higher margin for Amazon.

Additionally, recycling listing ASINs is a common tactic that Amazon could stop and is a source of "fake" (or at least, irrelevant in content and misleading in score) reviews. There's minimal enforcement of rules for review integrity, such as verified purchases or quid pro quo "warranties" and "free gifts" for 5 star reviews.

All the evidence I see points to Amazon preferring the status quo.
- I tried posting a negative review that mentioned a quid pro quo (offered a gift card in exchange for a 5 star review) and Amazon removed it for not being relevant to the product. So baseless 5 star reviews are allowed but not 1 star reviews.
"Brushing" scams seem way too common and easily executed through Amazon in order for them to not be turning a blind eye about it, imo. My mom was sent random LED lights for months through their return program despite never ordering them or hardly using amazon at all before she figured out what was happening. It feels like at least 5% of all my purchases come with a policy breaking email from the seller contacting me asking me for a five-star review in exchange for a free gift. Or even just contacting me 6 months later from a totally unrelated purchase and offering me a gift for no reason in exchange for a five-star review. Oh, they'll sure reimburse the money it costs to buy it! Because they really just want that five-star review! And Amazon seems to be happy allowing five-star reviews for products that are given away for free and even has a tag to let other users know, but just this method is frowned upon? I doubt it.

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

Came here to say this.
Guess it'll have to be a live service that is constantly running and updating what a wonderful world

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

Per the article, they are integrating Fakespot into Firefox, so it won't be different. Hopefully the tool can be improved
- Yeah. Fakespot is no better at all. The best thing to do right now is know if a product has only been listed for less than a couple months and has hundreds of reviews, it's BS.
  
  Next up; go to the review section, sort by newest, and read those reviews. Usually the fake reviews are flooded in early and you get more real ones in later. I've seen things rated at like 4.5 stars with 500 reviews, but then half of the 10 most recent reviews will rate it 1 star.
I have a Firefox extension from this website, and another one... So I've had this all along. I guess it's great to hear they are building something into the product itself, though.
- I'd really prefer it stay as an extension, honestly. The whole of the userbase does not need this and I hate software bloat.

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's definitely coming as a browser feature, Mozilla has confirmed it :) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/review-checker-review-quality

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

We're switching to Firefox!

Just did it.

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.

I've already been using the fakespot extension for a few years, and honestly, it feels pretty useless. I've seen it give A and B scores for products that I know have fake reviews. And on Amazon or Walmart and similar sites, we already know that the reviews are bullshit, so what difference does it really make for it to tell me that? It's not like I have any better option in most cases.
- Eh, Fakespot has been decent enough for me. I think it works best when there are a lot of reviews, it's not very helpful when it's like 5-10 reviews on a product.
LibreWolf will probably have us covered.

It’s a fork of Firefox without Mozilla telemetry, and defaults set to “privacy on” basically.

I switched a couple months ago and am perfectly happy with it after well over a decade with Firefox.

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.

i've found that firefox on android is one of my favorite apps, even replacing native apps in many cases.
- I watch YouTube without ads all through Firefox
- Same. I even browse Lemmy in Ff.
- The question you're responding to isn't about the mobile app for Firefox; it's about the mobile app for Amazon. Apparently lots of other people misread that too, so at least you're in good company.

firefox hitting homeruns on user-friendliness with actually useful features that protect you online, while all other browser just wanna put more ads in front of your face.

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

No... 2 to 4 star reviews are more realistic. 5 star reviews are either fake or they got lucky and nothing bad happened. 1 star reviews usually are from people that were PISSED OFF while 2 to 4 star reviews are generally from people with more nuanced opinions than "this product cured my cancer" or "this product set fire to my cat and stole my significant other"

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

I mean, Fakespot already does the same thing. They rate the product based on the quality of reviews (whether or not they're fake).
- Yeah sorry, I wasn't aware the AI wars already spread into marketing-land

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.

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.

Yeah basically if you want free stuff, then you're incentivized to leave good reviews so that they are more likely to send you free stuff. Plus, there's a cognitive bias where you didn't pay for it so even if you would have been critical you're more likely to say something positive.
So it's a real review when someone receives cash to say good things about the product, gotcha.
- Stay in context, genius, you know exactly what I mean. Not bot or algorithm can do anything about a review, left by a real customer, with a real acct and purchase history, so yes, it's "real". Not being truthful is another thing.

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?

It's more than just bots, a lot are copy pasted 5 star reviews on shitty products. Or take for instance when sellers are allowed to completely change the listing but still have old reviews from a totally different product. Hopefully this is what they will filter out.
- Damn. Me too.
I’m confused. Teachers/professors have said that using AI to detect papers written by AI is highly unreliable.

Probably 99% of fake reviews have not been written by AI. Just copy/paste bots or cheap copy/paste workers.
Fakespot used to reveal more about how they detected fakes, but as you say there are obvious issues with that, as it's a bit of an arms race. They don't just look at the text of the individual review though. Folks who buy reviews tend to get them from "review farms" that do reviews for a lot of products, and they don't have an infinite number of Amazon accounts to use for that, so there are network effects that can be powerful indicators, and that aren't easy for manipulate.

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

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

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

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.

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

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'd do it if you could leave fully anonymous reviews. But I'm not about to review products with my real name attached to them, even if it's just first name.
- My account is old enough it doesn't have my real name attached.
I know two, plus one other who only reviews when it is very bad. Just always look at middle and low end reviews, and be very extremely choosy about sellers, and roll the dice.

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.

I mean I don't particularly like firefox either (although it's still probably the browser I dislike the least), but firefox needs users to keep google from having complete control over the web.
- but firefox needs users to keep google from having complete control over the web.
  
  Okay, but then what does that make Apple with Safari powered by WebKit (and it's mandated use on iOS)? In addition to the few and between browsers that make use of it like GNOME Web.

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 do not, please inform me, since as far as I know Firefox was always trying to be featurefull browser.
- It was a fork off the Netscape Navigator which included a news reader, an email client, a browser and a kitchen sink, from what I remember. They took the browser part out and created Firefox, but it was called something else at first. Firebird maybe? Can't recall.
- Maybe they mean lean compared to internet explorer toolbars? But yeah, it's never been minimal. And I doubt this would really add that much bloat memory-wise while running.
- please inform me
  
  Mozilla Application Suite contained an email client and a HTML editor, among other things. Firefox was supposed to "just a browser", so to speak:
  
  Firefox was created in 2002 under the code name "Phoenix" by members of the Mozilla community who desired a standalone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox
  
  According to the downvotes, hardly anyone remembers, even Mozilla is falling for feature creep again.

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.

You should switch to Firefox instantly then, because the amount of add-ons capable of doing that for you are endless.
There are many plugins for this...
This is best addon I have found for this. https://github.com/drive4ik/simple-tab-groups
- Yea, this is what I use and it’s the best FF alternative. Not perfect, for me, cuz I have too many steps to switch from one group to the next. At least when compared to Chrome’s native grouping all in one window.
Get something like Tab Wrangler that will close tabs for you. You'll learn to use bookmarks very quickly after that.

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.

AliExpress is the epitome of fake reviews to me, I see them all over. Sometimes with different reviewers using the same image lok
- Is it ? I regularily shop on aliexpress and I never saw dupplicate images from different reviewer. And generally most products have little review that all seems really legitimate.
  
  Maybe it depend what you are shopping for ? But I would expect everyone from lemmy to buy tech like me.
  
  I know that the results we get from the us are very different from in europe, maybe this has something to do with it ?
  
  For me Amazon is by far the worst, 50 000 all fake reviews talking about another product

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...

Webkit, yikes
- It's got great performance on Linux. Better to have more rendering engines than less. Chromium, Gecko (FireFox), and WebKit. The more the merrier!

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