Why is Amazon deleting negative reviews of Hillary Clinton’s new book?
By
Andre Damon
15 September 2017
Amazon, the world’s largest online reseller, has deleted over 1,000 negative comments on Hillary Clinton’s newly-released book, What Happened, to give the book a five-star rating.
The book’s Amazon user rating is higher than the most popular editions of War and Peace and A Tale of Two Cities, widely considered to be among the greatest books ever written.
Early on Wednesday, the day of its release, the book had an extremely low rating of two and a half stars, based on nearly 1,700 reviews. But that figure was slashed to just over 500 later in the day, and stands at 623 at the time of this writing. The rating shot up to 4.9, rounded up to five stars in the graphic shown to users.
Amazon sought to justify this blatant act of mass censorship. “We do however have mechanisms in place to ensure that the voices of many do not drown out the voices of a few and we remove customer reviews that violate our community guidelines,” an Amazon spokesperson told Fortune magazine.
As a result of these actions, the book has just 21 “critical” reviews and 602 “positive” ones. This is despite the fact that the top seven most popular customer reviews gave it one or two stars.
As a work of political writing, Clinton’s book does not deserve the perfect score that Amazon gives it.
Leaving aside interpretation and opinion, its description of the key events of the 2016 election presents a level of selectiveness that borders on falsification. It ignores the widely-documented bias inside the Democratic National Committee toward the Clinton campaign, including the rigging of several debates, which led to the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the head of the DNC, and…