Amazon: User Ratings, Fake Reviews, and ... Censorship?

I'm a longtime, enthusiastic user of Amazon. I'm disabled, and their site gets products to me which would otherwise be difficult or impossible to obtain. For that, I am very grateful.

I'm also an enthusiastic reader of eBooks. I've got a subscription to BookBub, and I download at least one eBook per week, either for free or for a very small cost, generally a dollar or two. I also borrow eBooks from my state's electronic library and download them from Amazon. And of course, sometimes I buy eBooks at full price. So that's another aspect of Amazon which I love.

And for years I've relied on the star ratings and user reviews of products before making a purchase. I liked this feature a lot. I even felt that I'd rather read the reviews of people who actually use the products as opposed to those written by some pompous, know-it-all professional reviewer. Yeah! Power to the people!

However. Recently I listened to a podcast from Planet Money called The Fake Review Hunter. And this opened my eyes to something. Not all of those glowing reviews I was reading on Amazon were real. In fact, a lot of them were fake.

I have to admit that even before listening to this podcast, I'd begun wondering about the reliability of the reviews and ratings I'd been seeing on Amazon. Some of the products I bought based on the reviews turned out to be less ... ah, satisfying than I expected.

And some of the books with four-plus stars turned out to be horrible.

Now I had an explanation for this discrepancy. Fake reviews.

The other day I started reading a book which had 32 reviews on Amazon, with an average rating of 4.3 out of five. Had to be good, right?

Nope. Here's an excerpt from the critical review I wrote of the book:

I wanted to like this book. But the story line lacks credibility and clarity: how did these two women from Chicago both end up in the same small town in Texas - and have it be a complete surprise? And if it was due to relatives and friends settling there, why didn't at least one of those people inform the two protagonists that one of them lived there as well?

I plowed past that part, but the book didn't get any better. The scenes and descriptions of emotions are endlessly repetitive, completely lacking in originality. And illogical. If the two of them were so in love with each other, why do they keep dancing around the possibility of splitting up, even after they've made wonderful, passionate love? For days?
...
Anyway. As you can tell, I did not like this book. I was very disappointed.

But my original review also included speculation that some of those highly positive reviews might be fake. A lot of the reviews sounded suspiciously similar, and a significant number were posted on the same day - the day the book had been published.

I looked the book up on ReviewMeta, the website discussed in the Planet Money podcast about fake reviews, and sure enough, the book failed the site's test. Only three of the 32 reviews were considered reliable.

Interesting, right? Something I should mention in my own review? Of course!

I included my guess that some of the reviews were fake, mentioned the findings of ReviewMeta, and posted the review. And waited. And waited. Hours passed.

I'd posted the review from within my Kindle app, so it should have appeared on both the Amazon and Goodreads pages for the book. It showed up on Goodreads, but Amazon? No dice.

I thought about this for a while. I couldn't remember ever seeing any review on Amazon mentioning "fake reviews" or "ReviewMeta."

Could it be that Amazon is censoring reviews, suppressing any that suggest that other reviews might not be authentic? No! Amazon is an up-front, totally trustworthy company; it deals straight with its customers. Amazon wants us to know the truth! Doesn't it? Of course! Right? Right?

I edited my review on Goodreads, eliminating all mention of my doubts about the authenticity of some of the reviews of the book, and deleting the discussion of ReviewMeta's findings. Then I copied and pasted that edited review into the review space for the book on Amazon.

Moments later, the revised review appeared on Amazon.

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You can get the ReviewMeta browser add-on here.