Well, that's a good step forward. At least it allows for some kind of recourse, although I wonder how far it reaches when most are remote. At least they can't be based in the U.S.

“Fake reviews not only waste people’s time and money, but also pollute the marketplace and divert business away from honest competitors,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “By strengthening the FTC’s toolkit to fight deceptive advertising, the final rule will protect Americans from getting cheated, put businesses that unlawfully game the system on notice, and promote markets that are fair, honest, and competitive.”

Fake reviews are a pain. In my experience the only people who bother to review are competitors and fake accounts. I have no need for fake reviews when providing a free service. One competitor complained that comments were disabled on my YouTube videos.

One competitor complained that comments were disabled on my YouTube videos.

Lol

Amazon suffers greatly, and it's often obvious. The problem is the sheer number of fake reviews.

Bear in mind that many of these fake reviews are coming from people who are paid by unscrupulous business ventures. My late ex wife was one of them.

Freelancers can be hired for fake reviews or you can easily create them yourself by using unique email addresses and a VPN that rotates IP address. Then there is no limit to how many YouTube accounts that can be created.

This is nothing new and those that provide and rate reviews should have known better in the first place.

One of the other issues is that many, many SMBs do now know how to deal this type of issues. One would launch a newly minted website, get a few(lets get real here, from friends) positive reviews, then throw money on advertising, or vice versa. And then local competitors come roaring in with *rap reviews, So sad to see people invest into something so passionately and then get disappointed that the Web does not like them.

One thing I noticed that after mentioning that a positive online review would go a long way while customer is "being serviced" cuts down on this negative stuff,. even with eventual one star(fake) - positive outwitted most of negatives. Publishing actual positives/negatives that can also be shown on the web on your own website also helps to calm things down.

Where reviews can do the most damage is on Apple Store and Google Play. The only reviews I see there for our apps are from competitors and idiots who cannot read. No-one else bothers to write a review. Those enjoying the apps downloaded them and went on to use them. So now, all that everyone sees is 1 star reviews and claims about "rubbish".