Firefox tests system to catch fake product reviews

Mozilla has confirmed that it is testing a tool to identify fake product reviews in Firefox. The Review Checker tool will be native in the company’s browser. Created by Fakespot, a company that was acquired by Mozilla, the technology is available as an extension in other browsers and applications.

The tests with the Review Checker were found by the website MSPowerUser and later confirmed by Byron Jourdan, senior director of product at Mozilla, in a statement sent to The Verge. As much as fake reviews are a big problem for customers, marketplaces do not come out unscathed from these practices organized by malicious merchants.

To identify fake reviews, Review Checker uses artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to identify patterns and similarities between product reviews posted by users.

In other words, the tool looks for language vices — something that can give away the authorship of a text. For example, from reading so many articles from college friends, sometimes I recognize that the author is a friend when I’m in the middle of the text. The difference is that it takes a human a long time to keep the patterns, so imagine reading multiple reviews on a website and recognizing similarities. Only one machine is capable of accomplishing the task.

In recent years, Amazon and Meta (which has a marketplace within Facebook) have increased investment against fake reviews. The former has (or had, until the mass layoffs) 12,000 employees worldwide dedicated to hunting down deceptive reviews.

In the case of Meta, Facebook is also used for sellers to pay people to write fake reviews about the product, the merchant, or both. About 1,000 sellers have been sued by Amazon for using the social network to hire reviewers.

These fake reviews on the online store can trick the customer into buying a poor quality product. However, in most cases and in theory, the headache goes to the marketplace. The customer can request a refund and even call Procon. The bad buyer experience goes to the Amazon account, which makes room for that merchant — and many customers don’t even know that the sale may not be made by the company.

Review Checker will continue to be available for competing browsers
Jourdan, a senior director at Mozilla, said plans to make Review Checker native to Firefox don’t mean the feature will be shut down in rival browsers. The executive explained to The Verge that Review Checker will continue to be available as an extension. Jourdan also said that there is no date for the official launch of the feature.