When you drive a 15-year-old Subaru, you yearn for Bluetooth but you’re willing to settle for the aux input. Yet even when I happen to have the appropriate cable handy, I realize I’ll need something else: the small Apple headphones adapter that stopped coming with new iPhones years ago.
So I turn to Amazon. I quickly find a 2-pack of the adapters for under $8, delivered to my door! It’s not the Apple version but it gets more than 4 stars! Score! I’ll be pumping up the volume on my Gen X playlists in no time, I think to myself.
Well, not quite. Upon arrival, the first adapter stops working after three days, no matter how I contort its jointure with the cord, and the second one just never works at all.
We’ve all had this experience. But since the purchase wasn’t a significant outlay in the first place, we move on without giving it a ton of thought. We grouse about it internally, perhaps, but then we break down and order the more expensive version, employing the wisdom of one who knows better and who is $8 poorer for it.
Such is our experience of Amazon’s fake review problem. There are myriad products for sale on its marketplace with manipulated reviews leading us to think they are a good buy, when they most definitely are not. Whether those reviews were bought in bulk, written by bots, or input by paid reviewers really doesn’t matter to us, as for us it all amounts to the same. And so we find ourselves in a situation we didn’t experience, at least not in the same way, shopping at the local mall.
Given all this, we feel justified in wanting to know: what exactly does Amazon owe its customers in this situation?
Well, the self-evident answer is that it owes its customers a concerted, good faith effort to weed out as many fake reviews as it can.
Amazon, of course, says this is exactly what it is doing. And GeekWire’s reporting over the last couple of years appears to back this up.
The company filed its first lawsuit over fake reviews in 2015 and said it blocked more than 250 million suspected fake reviews in 2023.
Amazon is also involved in multiple ongoing lawsuits against so-called fake review brokers. The company uses a variety of tools to identify and take down fake reviews, including machine learning models and expert investigators.
Now, alongside this, to be as clear-eyed as possible, we would have to acknowledge that eliminating all manipulation on its platform would likely represent a truly gargantuan task at this point, just given Amazon’s sheer size. Thus, asking Amazon to commit to such an endeavor is perhaps unrealistic, insofar as it would likely cost Amazon inordinate time and resources.
But looking at the situation in greater detail, I would suggest we really ought to weigh not only Amazon’s acts here, but also its interests — its motivations, its reasons for taking action. After all, in actual fact, it is in Amazon’s own interests to do everything it can to scrub false reviews. If everyone came to distrust its marketplace, sales would plummet. But even so, the problem doesn’t get fully resolved, such that we, the consumers, continue to find ourselves scrolling multiple pages scrutinizing things like time stamps and user names.
Why? Because when we examine it further, we see that the situation is not quite as straightforward as I just described it.
To see why, it helps to revisit the distinction between acts and interests I brought up a moment ago, a distinction drawn from the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s discussions of moral philosophy. In particular, we can look at the example Kant himself uses to illustrate this distinction: an example that, as it happens, is very much on theme. The example Kant uses is that of a seller in the town marketplace.
If a child comes to the seller’s stall, the seller might very well be tempted to charge more than usual because the child is an unsophisticated buyer. But let’s suppose the seller actually charges the child an honest price, Kant proposes. Well, then, the seller performs the morally upstanding act, but we would be wrong to hold the seller up as some sort of moral paragon, he says.
Why is this? Because once we think about it, we see that it is actually in the seller’s interest to be fair with the child. This is because the marketplace is essentially public. If word gets out that the seller is untrustworthy, well then his business tanks and he is left penniless. By cultivating a reputation for honesty, he operates in view of profiting in the long term. And thus, while his act is morally praiseworthy, his motivation in performing this act is far from selfless or altruistic.
What Kant wants us to see, then, is that it’s entirely possible to do the “right” thing sometimes, perform the right act, for ultimately selfish reasons. With sellers in the marketplace acting honestly out of self-interest, after all, buyers are actually fairly served in the end, which was their starting interest.
Let’s now consider Amazon’s acts and interests in the current situation from this point of view. To be sure, Amazon has a naked interest in consumers continuing to feel they can reliably find quality items on its site, and this is why, by all accounts and as we noted, it takes measurable steps to weed out fake reviews.
However, because the full extent of the fake review problem and the scale of its corrective action are not public knowledge (remember how for Kant actors in the marketplace act morally because trade takes place in public?), then we have to conclude that Amazon actually has a slightly different interest.
As things stand, it is in Amazon’s interest to take sufficient action to reassure most of us most of the time, but not to do too much (at least in a way that is noticeable), since this would wind up indicating the problem really is widespread. Its interests are aligned with taking some action, but at odds with taking aggressive, sweeping action, treating the problem as an urgent, truly pressing issue. Thus, we find ourselves, the buyers in the marketplace, in the situation we all know quite well: mostly assured, but then again, not quite. This state of affairs holds more or less steady because this is what Amazon’s interests dictate it should do with respect to its storefront.
Employing an ethicist’s way of approaching the problem, then, we see that, unfortunately, we have to conclude that as things currently stand it’s unlikely we will see any big changes coming soon that allow all of us to be optimally served as buyers. And in the end, as we saw, this isn’t just because there are a lot of bad actors out there, or because the virtual mall we’re dealing with is really, really big (and thus difficult to police, Segway be damned), but because of how our interests and Amazon’s interests come into conflict sometimes in the digital marketplace.
Regardless of the reasons, let’s hope our overall conclusion comes to look woefully out of date, like the dadrock I’m playing in my Subaru using my new connector, when the calculus changes.
