Amazon says it’s monitoring the system for signs of “abuse” after a page promoting Hillary Clinton’s new book, What Happened, was flooded with one-star reviews.
The book, a several-hundred page blame game disguised as a memoir, hit shelves yesterday, but before Amazon’s copies of What Happened had even reached doorsteps, the negative reactions began to pour in.
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Almost as soon as the negative reviewed piled up, Amazon began deleting them — and they didn’t even keep their mission secret. Screen caps clearly reveal entire swaths of one-star reviews have been scrubbed from the site, relegated to the dustbin unless the reviewer can prove they purchased the book through Amazon.
The company isn’t saying outright that Trump supporters are to blame, but their customer service representative’s statement seems to imply foul play.
“In the case of a memoir, the subject of the book is the author and their views. It’s not our role to decide what a customer would view as helpful or unhelpful in making their decision. 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,” she told Fortune magazine.
Still, a few hilarious examples have fallen through the cracks. One review read, “Read all the promotional excerpts, which combined come close to book length — pretty good novel. It is fiction, isn’t it? Surely, someone is playing a joke.”
And of course, even “verified purchasers” haven’t necessarily been kind. Reviews for Clinton’s book have been mixed. The New York Times liked it, but called it a “score-settling jubilee” as if Clinton wrote the tome while selecting possible scapegoats by throwing darts at a dartboard.