You may have heard that the rules for online reviews have changed. For the mattress industry, that’s a huge deal because those who post fake reviews will now be held liable for their actions.
Fake online reviews are now considered fraud thanks to a new FTC-instated rule, and we have a breakdown of what is now considered illegal.
- Businesses can’t buy positive or negative reviews with money or other incentives.
- No one can misrepresent that the reviews for their products on one of their websites are independent when the website is owned by the business.
- They can’t try to use social media to promote their products by buying followers or inflating views by using bots or hijacked accounts.
- Businesses can no longer use groundless legal threats to get a person to remove or not post a negative review of the business’ product.
- AI-generated personas cannot be used to give a testimonial for a company’s products
Not everyone follows the rules, but this should curb a large number of fake online mattress review sites or “independent” sites paid for by companies that run them. That’s a win for mattress retailers who rely on reviews for business — which is more important today than ever.
