Earlier this year a consumer group found that a quarter of reviews on some app-store categories were suspect. Product reviews on shopping sites are worse, and Mozilla — the non-profit behind Firefox, which has been looking for a reason to exist beyond “not Chrome” — has decided to make that its next feature. In May it bought Fakespot, a start-up that has spent seven years training models to detect fake reviews; in the November Firefox release, Fakespot becomes Review Checker, built into the browser.
What it does
Open a product page on Amazon, Best Buy or Walmart — the launch sites — and a sidebar appears with a letter grade, A to F, for the reliability of that product’s reviews, an adjusted star rating with the unreliable reviews removed, and a short AI-written summary of what the trustworthy reviews actually say. The model looks at the patterns that give bought reviews away: bursts of five-star reviews in a short period, text duplicated across products, reviewer accounts that only ever review one seller, and language that reads as generated. It also flags products that appear to have been pushed up search rankings by review manipulation. It is free, and it is off until you turn it on.
What it cannot do
It cannot read a review’s truth, only its pattern — a genuine review that happens to be short and enthusiastic can be downgraded, and a carefully written fake can pass. It works on three American retailers, which for a reader in Bangladesh means the goods you order through a relative or a courier service, not the ones you buy here. And Amazon, which has spent years suing fake-review sellers, would rather you trusted its own filters; Review Checker is a second opinion, not a verdict.
Why Mozilla is doing this
Firefox is the world’s fourth browser by users and has been losing share for a decade. Mozilla’s bet is that a browser that takes the user’s side against the sites it visits — blocking trackers, now grading reviews — is a reason to switch that Chrome, made by an advertising company, cannot offer. Whether a shopping feature moves the needle is the question the November numbers will answer.
Bringing the idea to Daraz
Bangladesh’s marketplaces have the same disease — the five-star flood on a new listing, the reviews in identical English on a Chittagong seller’s page — and no Fakespot. Until one exists, the manual version works: sort reviews by most recent rather than most helpful, read the one- and two-star reviews first, look for reviews with photographs, and be suspicious of any product whose reviews all arrived in the same week. That is roughly what the model does, without the letter grade.
Source: Gadgets Now, via Prothom Alo.
