Spot Fake Amazon Reviews With Fakespot

Megalith

Megalith

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How well this works may be up for debate, but some of you may find this useful. The website even has a section that lists the top shilled products.

Fakespot utilizes numerous technologies to validate the authenticity of reviews. The primary criteria is the language utilized by the reviewer, the profile of the reviewer, correlation with other reviewers data and machine learning algorithm that focuses on improving itself by detecting fraudulent reviews. The technologies include: profile clusters, sentiment analysis, cluster correlation and artificial intelligence intertwined with these functionalities.
 
I tried it on a few things I've ordered lately. If you do one that it hasn't checked yet, it checks not only all of the reviews for that product; it also checks all of the reviews written by anyone who reviewed the product. What I mean is that if Person A reviewed the item you are looking at, this analyzer looks at all of the Amazon reviews that Person A has ever written.

The EVGA G2 750W PSU has a 50% low quality ratings score. This should tell you that fakespot is ony judging the quality of the reviews, not the quality of the product; for those of us who actually know what products are good, this PSU is arguably one of the best 750W PSUs.
 
That's a nifty idea. I checked a couple items in my purchase history and they were mostly 5-10% fake reviews. Maybe Amazon can take this idea and blacklist known fake review accounts.
 
Think it is funny that a method used to root out fake reviewers is "✓ Overwhelming amount of positive reviews". Maybe you just know not to buy shit and so don't have any bad reviews to give. If you do proper research before buying stuff you have a good idea before you get it that you are buying a good product. If you only buy stuff that you know and trust then you normally get a good product. So not everyone is going to have lots of negative reviews to give.

I was almost going to call BS on their top rated item for being fake reviews then I noticed the review samples they gave all had *I was given this item at a reduced price for me to give my honest and unbiased review*. So I mean there people where kind of paid to do reviews, but they were open and honest about it.

I then scrolled down a few items Makerbot 3D printer. 93.1% Then I decided that they are BS on their review method lol. They look for a few words that are repeated and then decides that if it sees the same words or phrase these are fake reviews. So people using "Printer has been working great " means they are all fake because they are using the same wording. It has two people listed as reviews without purchasing product and yet in their descriptions they say that they have purchased the product and describe what they like about it. So I guess if you aren't verified to have purchased it through Amazon it decides you don't actually own the product as you can't purchase from anywhere else in the world.

So looking through a few items here I have, neat idea in theory but it is shit in practice and doesn't seem to do that great of a job.
 
The "Community" part of Fakespot is a bit peculiar for what I would expect to find in a "community". It's all "What is the best _____". If you sort by categories, you can find such things as "What is the best monitor?" to which the answer was the 27" Acer G276HL, or "What is the best router?" to which the answer is the ASUS RT-N66U, or "What is the best tablet?" to which the answer is the 7" 8GB Kindle Fire Kids Edition.
 
Exavior said:
Think it is funny that a method used to root out fake reviewers is "✓ Overwhelming amount of positive reviews". Maybe you just know not to buy shit and so don't have any bad reviews to give. If you do proper research before buying stuff you have a good idea before you get it that you are buying a good product. If you only buy stuff that you know and trust then you normally get a good product. So not everyone is going to have lots of negative reviews to give.

I was almost going to call BS on their top rated item for being fake reviews then I noticed the review samples they gave all had *I was given this item at a reduced price for me to give my honest and unbiased review*. So I mean there people where kind of paid to do reviews, but they were open and honest about it.

I then scrolled down a few items Makerbot 3D printer. 93.1% Then I decided that they are BS on their review method lol. They look for a few words that are repeated and then decides that if it sees the same words or phrase these are fake reviews. So people using "Printer has been working great " means they are all fake because they are using the same wording. It has two people listed as reviews without purchasing product and yet in their descriptions they say that they have purchased the product and describe what they like about it. So I guess if you aren't verified to have purchased it through Amazon it decides you don't actually own the product as you can't purchase from anywhere else in the world.

So looking through a few items here I have, neat idea in theory but it is shit in practice and doesn't seem to do that great of a job.
Click to expand...

If you look at the makerbot reviews, you will see one or 2 reviews a day, most of them 3 stars or less due to head clogging issues, but go back to last june and you will see dozens of extremely generic "this item is great and changed my life" 5-star reviews all posted over the span of a few days.

You dismissed the "overwhelming number of positive reviews" as a valid reason to flag as fake, but I doubt you actually looked at the review history for those users. If a user reviews dozens of items, all of which they rated 5-star, and none of which are "verified purchases" then you can be certain it's a shill account. It gets really obvious when 100% of their reviews are for products from the same company.

Before you decide that the analysis is wrong, maybe you should actually look at some of the reviews directly.
 
Ran this tool on the third edition of my book and 40% came back as suspect.

The tool is nonsense.
 
sir-gold said:
If you look at the makerbot reviews, you will see one or 2 reviews a day, most of them 3 stars or less due to head clogging issues, but go back to last june and you will see dozens of extremely generic "this item is great and changed my life" 5-star reviews all posted over the span of a few days.

You dismissed the "overwhelming number of positive reviews" as a valid reason to flag as fake, but I doubt you actually looked at the review history for those users. If a user reviews dozens of items, all of which they rated 5-star, and none of which are "verified purchases" then you can be certain it's a shill account. It gets really obvious when 100% of their reviews are for products from the same company.

Before you decide that the analysis is wrong, maybe you should actually look at some of the reviews directly.
Click to expand...

I did look through some. One example person has posted two reviews, both positive. Neither of which were worded in a way to make him sound fake. And yet since 100% (is both) of his reviews were 5 stars they flag him as a fake account and yes both items where none verified purchases but where very different things and from different companies, also you can buy items through other sites. Could even be through a different account. I personally have only purchased 1 item through amazon, however my work on my behalf has ordered a few dozen items. I don't have access to our purchasing department's account but could review an item they purchased on my behalf. That would mean I am not a verified purchaser but I do own the product and would be posting legit reviews. There are also people that when having good or bad experiences will review the item on multiple sites that they use just to make sure they give it praise or negative marks on multiple sites they use. I have noticed this once with a negative review. Guy posted on amazon, newegg and a few other sites about issues with some office phones to give them 1 star on every site. Would have been easy to view him as a troll or fake account, except everything he said was true, I was seeing the same trouble and was able to use his post to fix them some.
 
evilsofa said:
I tried it on a few things I've ordered lately. If you do one that it hasn't checked yet, it checks not only all of the reviews for that product; it also checks all of the reviews written by anyone who reviewed the product. What I mean is that if Person A reviewed the item you are looking at, this analyzer looks at all of the Amazon reviews that Person A has ever written.

The EVGA G2 750W PSU has a 50% low quality ratings score. This should tell you that fakespot is ony judging the quality of the reviews, not the quality of the product; for those of us who actually know what products are good, this PSU is arguably one of the best 750W PSUs.
Click to expand...

Indeed. Running the B1/B2 model through their site gives the same thing. Those models being not so great, certainly not as good as the G series.
 
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