Amazon has deleted over 900 reviews of Hillary Clinton’s new book | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has deleted over 900 reviews of Hillary Clinton’s new book

qz.com

45 pointskercker27 comments

Amazon did not delete 900 reviews of Hillary's book. Amazon deleted 900 comments that weren't book reviews. Amazon reviews are for reviews, not comments.

Edit: I misread this comment, and agree that a review isn't a review if it's just a comment. Leaving my original comment for context of my error :-)

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No, they were reviews. See the screen shot in the article: it shows stars (in this case a one-star review) with the review commentary. Followed by: "Except that in all likelihood the overwhelming number of bad reviews on Clinton’s book were not from genuine readers, but from a concerted attack to bring down the average reviews on her page. By 3:05pm New York time, Amazon had apparently deleted over 900 reviews of the book."

Grandparent's point is that it's not a real review if you didn't actually read the book, it's just a bullshit comment masquerading as a review.

Then I'd agree with that point. That's not how I read the comment, though on further reading of it, I can see that.

Ok, that makes real question whether they do this as a matter of normal course or if this is a case of a politician "author" (ghostwritten of course) receiving special treatment.

And the answer is, unsurprisingly, that this is definitely not standard Amazon operating procedure.

> ghostwritten of course

Proof?

> this is definitely not standard Amazon operating procedure

Proof?

Worse than clickbait this belongs in the "fake news" garbage bin.

Not biased at all, the first paragraph starts :

"During the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump galvanized a small but powerfully vicious fan base in his campaign against Hillary Clinton. Ten months after Clinton was defeated, things are getting nasty again."

Labeling Donald Trump's fan base as "small" and "vicious" is rather absurd. Apparently so small that he won the election. Absurd drivel. And misleading headline as others here have pointed out.

Another terrible clickbaity reddit title. Comments are not reviews. A review requires reading the book!

They also deleted reviews by people who purchased it and scored it low.

Where did it say that?

Zoe Quinn's recent book also had a similar (and predictable) skew between verified purchasers and non-verified. There's probably an amusing 'ethics in Amazon reviewing' joke to be made there but I'll quit halfway.

Amazon ought to limit reviews to purchasers.

Amazon doesn't know that a given reviewer hasn't obtained the book elsewhere. Do you know of any other books for which they have performed proactive censorship of reviews?

Right, that's why those people would, in this system, not be allowed to review it on Amazon. Because Amazon doesn't know whether the reviewer has or hasn't obtained the book at all.

And indeed, Amazon isn't really Good Reads. It's an online store. There's no reason why reviews there should cover anything except purchases. Except that it makes Amazon look more of an active community. While that was important years ago, does it really matter now?

It happens in many places. Look up Art of the Deal and filter by 1-star reviews, and you'll see many comments that are clearly just opinions of President Trump, as opposed to the book itself.

Clickbait title, we can already hear people screaming censorship without reading the article.

Even though this is the correct thing to do, I don't like it that this book got a special treatment. Will other books that have received bad reviews from non-verified purchasers have those reviews removed?

They won't, except they named Clinton

This is very interesting - back when I joined Amazon, one of the new hire on boarding questions was about how to deal with bad reviews and the principle was to just leave them as it is and not delete it - I am not 100% sure about it though - can someone confirm? If so deleting these reviews seems opposite to that

This isn’t new. Or isolated.

The key is whether the reviews are legit. If the review is made by someone who did not buy the product, its not a 'review'. It is then violating Amazon's rules and should be deleted.

By a large margin, the ratio of legitimate (verified buyer) to "maybe but probably not legitimate" reviewers is the worst out there at the time of this article's publishing. It's pretty clear these are not valid reviews.

Personally, I think on hot topic items like this, Amazon should simply lock down 100% to verified purchases for like, 2 weeks.

The reason they don't do this is that the people with pre-publication access to the book, while mostly the authors friends and family, are the only source of reviews for buyers looking at Amazon on launch day. They don't want to throw away those reviews, and those readers obviously didn't buy on Amazon.

They don't need those reviews in these cases. There are PLENTY of real reviewers in a high profile case like this.

I've reviewed plenty of items I didn't buy, mainly library books but also photo equipment on hire and tools and gadgets on loan from friends. Often being the only or second review.

Since my only investment is time ( or at most the loan fee ) I am not emotionally attached to the object and try to be as objective as possible.

Conversely I have sometimes postponed leaving a negative review of something I have bought until I can sell it on... cynical but no point cutting the bridge from under me

The news said it clear, some of the customers buy the book in a store, there is no evidence they didn't read it. And clearly big companys' values they always claims, such as 'leave bad reviews alone', 'don't be evil', they do not really want to obey it. They claim a rule, and break when they want, this is the real game rule.

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