That’s only true for extremely small values of “censorship”.
edit: hopefully somebody reading the WaPo has some sort of connection to Amazon, and can really commit to making sure that people's inappropriate opinions on the quality of books, the subjects of books, or whether books should have been written at all - will be corrected promptly and repeat offenders banned in future.
You can write what you want about books elsewhere. On Amazon, product reviews and ratings should be from people who have used the product. On Goodreads, reviews should be by people who have read the book.
This isn't about fake reviews, this is
1) partially about reviews from people who haven't read the book, but object to the subject matter or something else about the book, and
2) about "review-bombing," a phrase that is used a lot in this article without an argument being made as to exactly what constitutes review bombing (do the people involved have to collude?), or whether it's illegitimate. It just assumes that it is.
You've said "fake reviews" in this comment when the word "fake" wasn't used in the article a single time. They depend on you doing that for them.
Which is a fake review in my view. Or, at least, an irrelevant review. A review is supposed to be about the particulars of that book, not about whether or not the reader thinks the subject matter is objectionable. Presumably, people who dislike the subject matter won't be reading the book anyway, so such a review is worthless.
If you haven't read the book, you cannot possibly write a legitimate review of it.
This is not that. The big example cited is a bunch of people registering their objection to a light book being written about Soviet Ukraine while there's a war on. This is a real objection that a lot of (silly, annoying) people have. The reason the book was not published is because they thought that this objection would go viral and affect the sales of the book.
That has nothing to with fake or false. That has to do with suppressing financially threatening speech.
I cannot easily exclude it from the ratings. There's a pretty widespread understanding that star ratings are meant to aggregate the opinions of people who read the book.
Maybe review scores ought to be an aggregate of the opinions of people who read the book, but that's not what they actually are. They're an aggregate of how people feel towards a book (for any reason). Such reviews might even be against the rules and guidelines set out for reviews; reviews ought to follow the rules but that doesn't mean they will.
The utility of review scores derives wholly from how they actually work, not from how they're meant to work. So devalue them accordingly.