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Amazon Sues Admins of 10K Facebook Groups over Fake Reviews

In this April 17, 2019, file photo online customer reviews for a product are displayed on a computer in New York. (AP)
In this April 17, 2019, file photo online customer reviews for a product are displayed on a computer in New York. (AP)
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Amazon Sues Admins of 10K Facebook Groups over Fake Reviews

In this April 17, 2019, file photo online customer reviews for a product are displayed on a computer in New York. (AP)
In this April 17, 2019, file photo online customer reviews for a product are displayed on a computer in New York. (AP)

Amazon has filed a lawsuit against administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups it accuses of coordinating fake reviews in exchange for money or free products.

The Seattle-based e-commerce giant said in a statement posted on its website Tuesday the Facebook groups were set up to recruit people "willing to post incentivized and misleading reviews" across its stores in the US the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan.

The problem over phony reviews is not new for Amazon, or e-commerce as a whole. Amazon itself has previously sued people it said were offering fake testimonials, though lawmakers and regulators have questioned whether the company was doing enough to combat the issue.

Last year, UK competition regulators launched a probe into whether the online retailer and Google were taking adequate actions to protect shoppers.

In the statement, Amazon said one of the Facebook groups it’s targeting, called "Amazon Product Review," had more than 43,000 members. The company said Facebook removed the group this year, but it was able to dodge the platform’s detection by "changing letters in phrases that might set off Facebook’s alarms."

Amazon noted since 2020, it has reported more than 10,000 fake review groups to Meta, the parent company of Facebook. Meta has removed half of these groups and is investigating the others, Amazon said.

The retailer's announcement comes as another side of the company's operations is facing more scrutiny. On Tuesday, federal labor officials confirmed to the AP the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has opened inspections at Amazon facilities in New York, Illinois, and Florida after receiving referrals alleging safety and health violations from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office in New York, said federal labor officials entered the Amazon warehouses on Monday morning after their office made referrals about "potential workplace hazards," including "Amazon’s required pace of work for its warehouse employees."

Biase said the civil division of the US attorney's office is investigating safety hazards at the company's warehouses across the country, as well as "fraudulent conduct designed to hide injuries from OSHA and others."

The office is encouraging current and former Amazon warehouse workers to report workplace safety issues directly to them.

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Technology

Meta Shares Skyrocket, Microsoft Slides on Wall Street after Earnings

A Microsoft logo is seen a day after Microsoft Corp's $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn Corp, in Los Angeles, California, US, June 14, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
A Microsoft logo is seen a day after Microsoft Corp's $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn Corp, in Los Angeles, California, US, June 14, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
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Meta Shares Skyrocket, Microsoft Slides on Wall Street after Earnings

A Microsoft logo is seen a day after Microsoft Corp's $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn Corp, in Los Angeles, California, US, June 14, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
A Microsoft logo is seen a day after Microsoft Corp's $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn Corp, in Los Angeles, California, US, June 14, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Shares in Meta skyrocketed by 10 percent at opening on Wall Street on Thursday, a day after the social media giant posted better than expected earnings as the company invests heavily in artificial intelligence.

Microsoft, whose earnings disappointed analysts, saw its share price tumble by 10 percent, with investors showing concern for the return on investment for the software giant's spending on AI.

Technology

Samsung Logs Best-ever Profit on AI Chip Demand

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics posted record quarterly profits on Thursday, riding strong market demand for its artificial intelligence chips. Jung Yeon-je / AFP/File
South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics posted record quarterly profits on Thursday, riding strong market demand for its artificial intelligence chips. Jung Yeon-je / AFP/File
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Samsung Logs Best-ever Profit on AI Chip Demand

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics posted record quarterly profits on Thursday, riding strong market demand for its artificial intelligence chips. Jung Yeon-je / AFP/File
South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics posted record quarterly profits on Thursday, riding strong market demand for its artificial intelligence chips. Jung Yeon-je / AFP/File

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics posted record quarterly profits Thursday, riding massive market demand for the memory chips that power artificial intelligence.

A global frenzy to build AI data centers and develop the fast-evolving technology has sent orders for advanced high bandwidth memory microchips soaring.

That is also pushing up prices for less flashy chips used in consumer electronics -- threatening higher prices for phones, laptops and other devices worldwide.

In the quarter to December 2025, Samsung said it saw "its highest-ever quarterly consolidated revenue at KRW 93.8 trillion (US$65.5 billion)", a quarter-on-quarter increase of nine percent.

"Operating profit was also an all-time high, at KRW 20.1 trillion," the company said.

The dazzling earnings came a day after a key competitor, South Korean chip giant SK hynix, said operating profit had doubled last year to a record high, also buoyed by the AI boom.

The South Korean government has pledged to become one of the top three AI powers, behind the United States and China, with Samsung and SK hynix among the leading producers of high-performance memory.

Samsung said Thursday it expects "AI and server demand to continue increasing, leading to more opportunities for structural growth".

Annual revenue stood at 333.6 trillion won, while operating profit came in at 43.6 trillion won. Sales for the division that oversees its semiconductor business rose 33 percent quarter-on-quarter.

The company pointed to a $33.2 billion investment in chip production facilities -- pledging to continue spending in "transitioning to advanced manufacturing processes and upgrading existing production lines to meet rising demand".

- 'Clearly back' -

Major electronics manufacturers and industry analysts have warned that chipmakers focusing on AI sales will cause higher retail prices for consumer products across the board.

This week US chip firm Micron said it was building a $24 billion plant in Singapore in response to AI-driven demand that has caused a global shortage of memory components.

SK hynix announced Wednesday that its operating profit had doubled last year to a record 47.2 trillion won.

The company's shares have surged some 220 percent over the past six months, while Samsung Electronics has risen about 130 percent, part of a huge global tech rally fueled by optimism over AI.

Both companies are on the cusp of producing next-generation high-bandwidth "HBM4" chips for AI data centers, with Samsung reportedly due to start making them in February.

American chip giant Nvidia -- now the world's most valuable company -- is expected to be one of Samsung's customers for HBM4 chips.

But Nvidia has reportedly allocated around 70 percent of its HBM4 demand to SK hynix for 2026, up from the market's previous estimate of 50 percent.

"Samsung is clearly back and we are expecting them to show a significant turnaround with HBM4 for Nvidia's new products -- helping them move past last year's quality issues," Hwang Min-seong, research director at market analysis firm Counterpoint, told AFP.

But SK still "maintains a market lead in both quality and supply" of a number of key components, including Dynamic Random Access Memory chips used in AI servers, he said.

SK also this week said it will set up an "AI solutions firm" in the United States, committing $10 billion and weighing investments in US companies.

Technology

Google Unveils AI Tool Probing Mysteries of Human Genome

A Google logo is seen at a company research facility in Mountain View, California, US, May 13, 2025. (Reuters)
A Google logo is seen at a company research facility in Mountain View, California, US, May 13, 2025. (Reuters)
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Google Unveils AI Tool Probing Mysteries of Human Genome

A Google logo is seen at a company research facility in Mountain View, California, US, May 13, 2025. (Reuters)
A Google logo is seen at a company research facility in Mountain View, California, US, May 13, 2025. (Reuters)

Google unveiled an artificial intelligence tool Wednesday that its scientists said would help unravel the mysteries of the human genome -- and could one day lead to new treatments for diseases.

The deep learning model AlphaGenome was hailed by outside researchers as a "breakthrough" that would let scientists study and even simulate the roots of difficult-to-treat genetic diseases.

While the first complete map of the human genome in 2003 "gave us the book of life, reading it remained a challenge", Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind, told journalists.

"We have the text," he said, which is a sequence of three billion nucleotide pairs represented by the letters A, T, C and G that make up DNA.

However, "understanding the grammar of this genome -- what is encoded in our DNA and how it governs life -- is the next critical frontier for research," said Kohli, co-author of a new study in the journal Nature.

Only around two percent of our DNA contains instructions for making proteins, which are the molecules that build and run the body.

The other 98 percent was long dismissed as "junk DNA" as scientists struggled to understand what it was for.

However, this "non-coding DNA" is now believed to act like a conductor, directing how genetic information works in each of our cells.

These sequences also contain many variants that have been associated with diseases. It is these sequences that AlphaGenome is aiming to understand.

- A million letters -

The project is just one part of Google's AI-powered scientific work, which also includes AlphaFold, the winner of 2024's chemistry Nobel.

AlphaGenome's model was trained on data from public projects that measured non-coding DNA across hundreds of different cell and tissue types in humans and mice.

The tool is able to analyze long DNA sequences then predict how each nucleotide pair will influence different biological processes within the cell.

This includes whether genes start and stop and how much RNA -- molecules which transmit genetic instructions inside cells -- is produced.

Other models already exist that have a similar aim. However, they have to compromise, either by analyzing far shorter DNA sequences or decreasing how detailed their predictions are, known as resolution.

DeepMind scientist and lead study author Ziga Avsec said that long sequences -- up to a million DNA letters long -- were "required to understand the full regulatory environment of a single gene".

And the high resolution of the model allows scientists to study the impact of genetic variants by comparing the differences between mutated and non-mutated sequences.

"AlphaGenome can accelerate our understanding of the genome by helping to map where the functional elements are and what their roles are on a molecular level," study co-author Natasha Latysheva said.

The model has already been tested by 3,000 scientists across 160 countries and is open for anyone to use for non-commercial reasons, Google said.

"We hope researchers will extend it with more data," Kohli added.

- 'Breakthrough' -

Ben Lehner, a researcher at Cambridge University who was not involved in developing AlphaGenome but did test it, said the model "does indeed perform very well".

"Identifying the precise differences in our genomes that make us more or less likely to develop thousands of diseases is a key step towards developing better therapeutics," he explained.

However, AlphaGenome "is far from perfect and there is still a lot of work to do", he added.

"AI models are only as good as the data used to train them" and the existing data is not very suitable, he said.

Robert Goldstone, head of genomics at the UK's Francis Crick Institute, cautioned that AlphaGenome was "not a magic bullet for all biological questions".

This was partly because "gene expression is influenced by complex environmental factors that the model cannot see", he said.

However, the tool still represented a "breakthrough" that would allow scientists to "study and simulate the genetic roots of complex disease", Goldstone added.