Amazon DELETES Negative Reviews of Hillary's 'What Happened' Book
Amazon
can't just sell books, it has to alter how people feel about
them.
Via Yahoo, we saw the London Telegraph reported
that "Amazon has been monitoring and deleting reviews after
Hillary Clinton's new book was greeted with a torrent of
criticism on the day it was released."
The result? As of Thursday night, fully 94 percent of
Amazon's 655 Hillary book reviewers have awarded the
book 5 stars....and only 3 percent have disapproved with a
one-star review. Guess who hasn't reported on this website
manipulation so far? The Amazon-owned Washington Post.
The Telegraph reported:
Few of the one-star reviews remain on the website,
but reports and screengrabs show that reviewers used the
space to criticise the former First Lady and spread
conspiracy theories about her and Bill Clinton.
One one-star review, which remains on the website at
the time of writing, reads: "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."
Amazon is rarely moved to delete reviews so publicly, although in
November negative comments under a book by anti-Trump broadcaster
Megyn Kelly appeared to be removed by the retailer.
It might seem obvious that not every reviewer has read the book, but
it just offering an opinion on the author. But this isn't just true for
the one-star reviews. It's just as obvious that Hillary die-hards would
hit the 5-star button without reading it. A naive shopper may think this
book is bowling over readers...instead of realizing this might be a very
political campaign.
Let's compare the Hillary star-count to Donald Trump's recent
campaign manifestos to see how campaign boosters and haters compare. His
2016 book
Great Again drew 75 percent 5-star reviews, and 13 percent
one-star marks. The 2015 book
Time to Get Tough showed 70 percent were 5-star reviews,
and 16 percent were one-star rulings.
What about a more traditional book? See the page for Shattered:
Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by two liberal
reporters -- 38 percent 5-star reviews, and 16 percent one-stars. That
means 46 percent are in between.
Here's what Amazon said in response:
Speaking to Fortune, a spokesperson from the company
said: "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."
Jazz Shaw at Hot Air reviewed how Amazon community guidelines throw
red flags at things like obscenity, defamation, and the appearance of
"political campaigning."
Unless making negative comments about Clinton constitutes
“political campaigning” I don’t see anything here which would
disqualify a negative review absent any obscenity. Amazon also goes
out of their way to say that they don’t “regularly review posted
content.” Really? Somebody seems to have been working overtime to
review the comments about Clinton’s book so this is being treated as
a special case.
PS: Here's one more little pointer about the Washington Post.
The Hillary book page carries this blurb from the Post:
“What Happened is a raw and bracing book, a guide to our
political arena.”
—The Washington Post
But the actual review by snarky Post reporter
David Weigel also compared Hillary's "bitter" memoir to Nixon's:
But still, Clinton cannot let that Comey moment go. She quotes
Fox News clips, legal analysis and congressional testimony to
conclude that she was wronged. She takes subtle pleasure in Comey
being fired by President Trump six months later. She apologizes to
the reader, who has to relive all of this. "It wasn't healthy or
productive," she writes, "to dwell on the ways I felt I'd been
shivved."
It's a perfect word, "shivved." The Hillary Clinton of
this bitter memoir resembles the shrunken, beaten Richard Nixon who
told David Frost that he gave his enemies a sword and "they twisted
it with relish." Again and again she blames herself for
losing, apologizing for her "dumb" email management, for giving paid
speeches to banks, for saying she would put coal miners "out of
business." She veers between regret and righteous anger, sometimes
in the same paragraph.
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https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2017/09/14/amazon-deletes-negative-reviews-hillarys-what-happened-book
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