Amazon deletes thousands of "What Happened" reviews after Clinton publisher complaint

[Miles Archer]

Amazon deletes thousands of ‘What Happened’ reviews after Clinton publisher complaint

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/09/amazon-deletes-thousands-of-what-happened-reviews-after-clinton-publisher-complaint/

Simon & Schuster says it’s “highly unlikely” that the nearly 2,000 customer reviews on Amazon are from people who have actually read Hillary Clinton’s book, What Happened.

The widely divided reviews leave nearly no middle ground, with more than half giving it a one-star rating and a bit less than half giving the book five stars.

Amazon deleted more than 1,000 reviews by mid-afternoon Wednesday, although the book’s rating has held steady in the middle-ground between the deeply polarized comments. The screenshots below show a large decline in the total number of reviews between noon and 2 p.m. EDT Wednesday.

A publisher representative told the AP Wednesday that both the very high praise and very critical reviews contained little actual information from the content of the book. "It seems highly unlikely that approximately 1,500 people read Hillary Clinton's book overnight and came to the stark conclusion that it is either brilliant or awful,” said Simon & Schuster representative Jonathan Karp.

[Girard442]

1. Sadly, information from social media (like Amazon reviews) is not useful when there's controversy...

...unless it's important to you what the trolls are thinking.

[Wounded Bear]

2. They should probably just not take reviews for a week after a release...

especially on a full-length book. I'm not sure how they screen the reviews, but they tend to be pretty useless for anybody remotely 'controversial.'

[forgotmylogin]

5. Or perhaps just don't aggregate them.

Meaning, they should show the reviews with the individual rating and let you sort low to high or high to low, but not average them out with one rating so that you need to read reviews individually to get an idea.

That way anyone can write a review, but there's no average score to "hammer" up or down with BS ratings.

That would knock the legs out from under people who register dozens of fake accounts to skew the average.

[aikoaiko]

3. I seem to recall a couple of DU posts suggesting that people hammer Amazon

with positive ratings.

[PoliticAverse]

4. Direct link to the International Business Times article...

http://www.ibtimes.com/hillary-clinton-what-happened-negative-amazon-reviews-deleted-after-publisher-2589513