“Amazon is censoring any bad reviews of this book — surprise surprise”
When trolls come knocking
When an obviously bogus review gets posted to the Amazon listing of a book you’ve written you have little recourse. You of course may “report” it to that vast ocean of words and code and people that make up Jeff Bezos’s empire. If you do so you are given these four anodyne options:
But what do you do when an obviously politically motivated “reader” of your elections-related novella drops a single star evaluation of your book with the headline “not funny at all” and then qualifies this assessment with a one line “review”: “Amazon is censoring any bad reviews of this book — surprise surprise”?
Well, I guess you can do a Medium post.
And if you were to do such a post I suppose you might ask where this review came from and what motivated the “reader” to post it in the first place? You could start by asking if this reviewer is even a person. A 2020 analysis by a fraud-detecting service called Fakespot found that out of 720 million Amazon reviews — about 42 percent of the total reviews posted — were not real.
