India introduces new policy to combat fake reviews on e-commerce platforms

India ’s e-commerce platforms have long been rife with fake reviews, and the government has finally stepped up to curb fake and misleading reviews on e-commerce platforms and websites.

The policy will start with voluntary reviews and will be made mandatory if fake reviews continue to grow . More than a year ago, New Delhi proposed stricter e-commerce rules to limit fake reviews and comprehensively address the "widespread cheating" problem .

The Indian government announced the guidelines to combat fake reviews on Monday , which will come into effect on November 25. The guidelines , called IS 19000: 2022, were prepared by India's Ministry of Consumer Affairs and will be administered by the Bureau of Indian Standards.

According to the guidelines , e-commerce platforms need to set up reviewers to use tools or manually screen reviews . The guidelines say the review should also include the date the review was published and the star rating .

In addition, the guidelines also state that e -commerce platforms should restrict people who post fraudulent reviews from posting such reviews again in the future and require users who submit reviews to verify their identities through the platform. The guidelines state that platforms need to verify consumers' identities through email, phone number, IP address or using verification codes.

" All the big e- commerce players are fighting fake reviews online . Some of them have already taken action . But I think we are the first to do it in a standardized process . We will do it on a voluntary basis at first , and if the problem doesn't improve , we may make it mandatory in the future , " Indian Consumer Affairs Minister Rohit Kumar Singh said at a press conference in New Delhi.

E-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Flipkart have not yet commented on this.

Last year, Amazon evaded its responsibility for the fake review problem , but admitted that it had blocked more than 200 million such suspicious reviews on the platform in 2020 .

The UK competition regulator also launched an investigation into fake reviews on Amazon last year, and in June this year, Meta updated its community feedback policy to limit irrelevant reviews on its platform .

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Fake reviews