Facebook Portal was an endeavor by the world’s biggest social network to discover a place into your home and play a fundamental job in communication with friends However, so as to accomplish that goal, it turns out Facebook employees have been endeavoring to support the device with fake reviews on Amazon.
Tech columnist Kevin Roose on Thursday published a tweet that appeared to indicate show fake Amazon surveys posted by Facebook employees on the Facebook Portal posting on the e-commerce site. The surveys all accompany five-star ratings and the general population connected to them just so happen to have the same correct name of Facebook employees.
There are around 100 five-star surveys on Amazon’s Facebook Portal listing, and something like three of them are from people with precisely the same names as Facebook employees: Tim Chappel, Javier Cubria, and Oren Hafif.
Over at Facebook, a person named Tim Chappel is the head of supply chain and vital sourcing of AR/VR products. An person named Javier Cubria is a Facebook event marketer and Oren Hafif is a security engineering manager at Facebook.
Strangely, Amazon lists the reviews as “verified purchases,” which means every one of the three people suspected to be Facebook employees really purchased the Portal on Amazon.
Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth tweeted after the reviews were found that the surveys posted on the site were “neither coordinated nor directed from the company.” He added that Facebook would ask the employees to take down the reviews. They’ve since been removed from Amazon.
Altogether, there are 160 surveys of the Facebook Portal on Amazon. We put the reviews through Fakespot’s search engine, which analyzes whether client surveys can be trusted. The listing got a Fakespot score of D and found that the reviewer design proposes there’s “high deception involved” in the surveys. Only 54 percent of the surveys are regarded “reliable.”
We reviewed the Facebook Portal last year and gave it a score of 2.5 out of 5, or a “Meh” rating. At least for now, we don’t recommend it.