Update: Since I posted this all over my social media, Amazon has notified me that they have "reviewed" my reviews and decided they were Kosher enough to put back. But stay woke!
Check your book's Amazon site. Amazon is banning reviews left and right, often for no good reason.
All the reviews I wrote on Amazon have been removed. No notice. I only found out when I tried to post a negative review for defective merchandise I received yesterday, telling me that my reviews are no longer welcome on Amazon. Next, an author contacted me to say that my review disappeared from their book's Amazon page.
I have a strict honesty policy. If I don't like a book, I don't review it. Period. And when I review, I'm careful to include either a quote or items that clearly reflect that I've read and considered the book.
Right now there's a sweeping Amazon policy that will affect all of your book reviews on Amazon. Some of things to be aware of, as far as their bots are concerned:
1. If there's an indication that the reviewer and author know each other, the review can be removed.
2. If you say you received a complimentary copy, the review can be removed.
3. If 5-6 reviewers post in the same day, all those reviews can be removed.
("Andddd...YOU'RE OUT!")
I'm not that worried. I still review for Midwest Book Review which has an excellent reputation and I'm honored to have a review "shelf" with them. And my reviews can still be found on Roadmap Girl's Book Buzz and L.A. Now & Then...plus Twitter, Facebook, etc.
AMAZON REVIEWER ALERT!
By Nate Hoffelder
And it's still not enough. Fake
reviews are still being posted, mostly due to an underlying problem.
Buzzfeed published a story earlier this week that
delved into the dark underbelly of the paid review ecosystem that has sprung up
to manipulate rankings on Amazon. This massive system continues to operate
despite Amazon's best efforts:
The systems that create
fraudulent reviews are a complicated web of subreddits, invite-only Slack
channels, private Discord servers, and closed Facebook groups, but the
incentives are simple: Being a five-star product is crucial to selling
inventory at scale in Amazon’s intensely competitive marketplace — so crucial
that merchants are willing to pay thousands of people to review their products
positively.
To be fair, Amazon isn't the only
retailer with a fake review problem; earlier this week Valve announced it had permanently banned a game developer from the
Steam marketplace after finding out that developer's employee had posted fake
reviews.
This problem exists in all
marketplaces, and not just Amazon, but Amazon is the only retailer who has a
reputation for banning innocent reviewers, thereby punishing innocent authors.
Right about the time that Buzzfeed
was publishing its article, I was reading FB post after FB post from authors
whose reviewers were getting banned from posting reviews.
Elena Page wrote about how she lost
one of her first fans: "Amazon emailed her last week and accused her of
leaving biased reviews on Amazon. She was banned from ever leaving reviews on
Amazon again, and told she was not allowed to argue her case or refute the
claim in any way. All the reviews she’s ever left, have been removed."
Other authors chimed in with similar
reports, including one who noted that their books had lost most of the reviews
even though none of the reviews were fraudulent.
Amazon has an automation problem.
This company uses bots to run almost every aspect of the Kindle Store from
detecting fake reviews to checking the formatting in ebooks and finding fraud
in Kindle Unlimited, but the bots don't work very well. This leads to
situations where innocent authors are punished because Amazon's
bots think the authors are scamming Kindle Unlimited while the actual scammers
continue to operate at a massive scale.
The under-performing bots are also
in part to blame for the ongoing problem with fake reviews on Amazon.com.
The simple fact is Amazon can't
tell which reviews are fake, and which are forbidden by policy, and they're not
the only ones.
A lot of the recent stories about
fake reviews, including the Washington Post article from last month and Buzzfeed's piece, have relied on a
company called ReviewMeta. This one of two startups that have developed
algorithms to detect fake reviews. The other is called Fakespot, which
has its own algorithms that work in essentially the same way.
These two companies will tell you
that they can identify which reviews are fake with a high degree of certainty,
but the thing is, they rarely agree and that raises serious questions as to
their accuracy.
After the Washington Post reported
on the fake review problem last month, David Gaughran followed up with a post
that pointed out how ReviewMeta falsely labeled his books as having fake reviews.
Okay, this doesn’t look good. And if you look down the
page it shows each of the products they have assessed that led to this overall
brand trustworthiness score. You can see many of my books have “failed” in the
eyes of ReviewMeta and “Unnatural reviews detected” has been appended to
several of my books. Crikey.
You can click on each product and
see how it came to that determination, and the supposed evidence for each
component of that decision. Again, I stress, this transparency is truly
commendable.
But this breakdown also reveals the
faulty assumptions that led to these incorrect determinations about my reviews.
And it’s not just my reviews, of course. These simplistic calculations affect
most authors. (You can search for your own books here.)
You can find ReviewMeta's analysis
of David here. While you are at it, you might also want to
take a look at Fakespot's analysis.
The thing about these two companies
is that they identified some of David's books as having fake reviews, but not
all. The other thing about these two companies is that they didn't agree on
which books had fake reviews.
One thought Let's Get
Digital was tainted, while the other passed the book. The same goes
for Liberty Boy, and other titles.
The disputed analyses call into
question the very idea that fake reviews can be identified by
algorithms. As David put it:
The sad thing about all of this is
that Amazon does have a fake review problem, one which is
compounded by Amazon deploying a fake review detection algorithm that seems
about as accurate as the one from ReviewMeta, perhaps for similar reasons too.
Which means that authors innocent of any wrongdoing get genuine, organic
reviews from bona fide reviewers removed every day and the
scammers and cheaters with fake reviews keep getting away with it.
This problem is only going to get
worse before it gets better.
