Deceptive Consumer Review Practices

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has updated its endorsement guides to include a new section on consumer reviews. In previous versions of the guides, the FTC focused on appropriate disclosure of material connections between reviewers and products. However, the updated guides now address deceptive practices, such as manipulating or editing consumer reviews to distort or misrepresent what consumers think of products. These practices include sorting reviews by favorability rating, deleting negative reviews, featuring only favorable reviews on third-party sites, and threatening reviewers. This expansion of guidance aims to prevent advertisers from using consumer reviews in misleading or deceptive ways.