While we don’t like to get involved in political conspiracies, a few articles recently caught our eye:

• BIAS ALERT: Amazon ‘fixed’ reviews for Hillary Clinton’s book (Fox News)
• Amazon steps in to ‘fix’ Hillary book review (WND.com)

Before we begin, we want to stress that we aren’t trying to take sides here – in fact, we’re not in support of either candidate; we’re simply sharing our knowledge and offering some additional insight into what’s going on.  

Clinton’s book is not the first to be “Brigaded” and subsequently cleaned up by Amazon.

“Brigading” is a term we use when online trolls group together to flood another site (or subsection of a website) with their message.  It’s easy to spot with the Unverified Purchases test on ReviewMeta.com.  When the unverified purchases rate the product considerably lower than the verified purchases, it’s typically a sign of brigading.  

Here’s a screenshot of Amy Schumer’s book BEFORE Amazon deleted many of the unverified reviews:

Here’s a snapshot of Hillary’s “Stronger Together” taken 9/16, BEFORE the clean-up:

Even Trump’s book “Crippled America” appears to be under attack, although to a much lesser degree:

No author or product is exempt from potential brigade attacks: neither democrats nor republicans.  Here’s a few more examples where the unverified purchases rate the product considerably lower than the verified ones:

• My Parents Open Carry
• Make America Great Again Hat Donald Trump Hat
• The Brainwashing of My Dad
• Fun World Women’s Native American Costume

Only a few weeks ago, Amazon did a big clean-up of the unverified reviews on Amy Schumer’s book.

Earlier this month, Amy Schumer was under attack from unverified purchase reviews and Amazon ended up deleting many of them.  We even wrote an in-depth analysis on the situation: The anti-Amy Schumer Amazon brigade: a breakdown.

Does this mean that Jeff Bezos is also a secret Amy Schumer supporter willing to change the rules in her favor?  Unlikely.  It’s more likely that someone reported these reviews, whether it was a fan or Amy herself, and then Amazon employees performed their duties to enforce their review guidelines.

The rules did not change in Hillary’s favor, at least not this time.

As claimed by WND.com, “If you can’t even win when the rules are changed in your favor, things must be REALLY bad.”

This is simply not true.  Take a look at the Customer Reviews Guidelines FAQ from Authors and you’ll see a lot of talk about removal of reviews:

Reviews get removed from Amazon all the time. It’s not specific to one candidate or the other.  Even Trump has deleted reviews.

Our tool, ReviewMeta.com, is constantly collecting data from reviews.  We can tell if a review has been deleted by scanning a product one day, and then seeing which reviews are no longer available at a later date.  (An important note is that our attorney advised us not to share the specific content of the deleted reviews or reveal the review author since this could contain sensitive information).

We found that Trump’s book “Crippled America” had at least 2 deleted reviews.  The average deleted review is 3 stars which is lower than the book’s average rating of 4.4 stars, actually giving the book a slight boost.

Even the iconic “Make America Great” hat has had at least 18 reviews deleted.  Yes, Amazon deleted both 5-star, 3-star and 1-star reviews, and verified and unverified purchase reviews.

Amazon also removed plenty of 5-star reviews on Hillary’s book.

We found 417 deleted reviews.  We understand that more were deleted, however this is the number of reviews we saw on 9/16/2016 but had disappeared by the time we checked back on 9/28/2016.  

Out of those 417 reviews that were deleted:

• 35 of them were actually 5-star reviews.  
• 414 were unverified purchases
• Of the 3 verified purchase reviews that were deleted, two of them were 5-star reviews.

So it’s not as though Amazon was specifically targeting negative reviews.  The average deleted review is 1.4 stars, and the average review on the book is also 1.4 stars, so the deleted reviews are actually representative of all reviews for the book.

The question is: Did the reviewers actually read the book?

Below is the current verified purchaser breakdown of “Stronger Together” as of today (9/28).  The statistical likelihood of a discrepancy of 4 stars occurring with 2,500+ reviews by random chance is less than one in a trillion.  The more plausible explanation is that one of the most unfavorable candidates ever is being brigaded.

Regardless of which candidate you prefer, it’s easy to see that Amazon is simply doing their job to help rid their platform of low-quality reviews that don’t add any real value to customers, and this isn’t Hillary’s master plan to get Jeff Bezos to rig the election in her favor.  

Leave a Reply