The FTC’s fake reviews ruling and what it means for you

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) just announced a new rule banning fake reviews and testimonials.

We’re very pleased about this change and have been working with the FTC since 2022 to provide input into the development and drafting of the rule. The FTC has responded positively to much of our input, based on our experience from championing trust for years, and we believe this rule will help crack down on bad actors and anyone who seeks to mislead consumers online through fake reviews. 

As a platform that has always taken a zero tolerance approach to fake reviews, much of the rule aligns with Trustpilot’s existing guidelines. And, in a few key areas, Trustpilot actually goes further than what the FTC is mandating:

1. The rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, whether positive or negative. We have banned incentivizing reviews on our platform since August of 2020. 

2. The rule prohibits a business from using unfounded or groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or certain false public accusations to prevent or remove a negative consumer review. This not only aligns with our policies around ensuring genuine voices are heard on Trustpilot, we have also taken action previously against companies who have tried to silence and remove reviews this way. 

3. The rule prohibits businesses from creating, selling, or buying fake or false consumer reviews. We have also taken legal action against companies who have bought and used fake reviews and we are firmly opposed to this. This new rule will be particularly helpful in creating more trust online, as it targets both review sellers as well as the businesses who buy fake reviews themselves. 

Why using a trustworthy review platform matters

This ruling also applies to companies who collect their own reviews and aren’t using a trusted review platform. Collecting reviews with a platform like Trustpilot means businesses can feel confident that they are using a platform that is aligned with the new FTC rule. And this isn’t only important so you can avoid potential fines down the road. It’s because building more trust online is better for your business and better for all of us as consumers. That’s why we’ve worked so hard on our mission to become a universal symbol of trust by tackling fake and dishonest reviews.

We’ve been at the forefront of fighting fake reviews and championing trust for years - in many areas, the FTC’s rules build on and reinforce the work we’ve been doing to ensure consumers and businesses have faith in online reviews. Online reviews are a vital part of the buying experience, and we are committed to working with the FTC, and other partners, to safeguard their integrity

We removed 3.3 million fake reviews from our platform last year alone (most of them before they even went live on the platform), which was 6% of the total reviews last year. 79% of those 3.3 million reviews were removed automatically using our fraud detection technology. 

Generative AI has made it quicker and easier to generate content, since it’s very good at writing text and it can be hard to tell if a review was written by a human or not. But whether a human wrote the review is only one out of many signals that we look at to determine whether a review is suspicious and should be taken off the platform or not. Our tech looks beyond the content of a review, at behaviors and patterns of use across the platform to make a determination, and that is something generative AI doesn’t help with today.  

The landscape for fake reviews is complex and it takes equally complex solutions and systems to try and combat it. This is one of the areas where our scale and our years of experience working to remove and fake reviews really pays off. We have over 267 million reviews on our platform. These reviews give us a huge amount of data to train our systems with, so they can continuously improve and help us stay ahead of bad actors. This helps us to ensure that our platform always stays trustworthy and honest. 

We have also partnered with other trusted review platforms last year to launch the Coalition for Trusted Reviews to help make reviews more trustworthy everywhere online, not just on our own platform. 

The bottom line is that each and every one of us wants to be able to feel confident when we’re making a purchase online. Between the work that Trustpilot and other trusted review platforms are doing and the FTC’s new rule, we’re confident that we’re going to get there. And after years of commitment to building more trust between businesses and consumers, it feels great to see rules like this being implemented and know others are on the case too.