Amazon deletes reviews of Michael Wolff’s book about Trump 

Amazon deletes reviews of Michael Wolff’s book about Trump 

This is actually old news from a while back but …

E-commerce giant Amazon is deleting reviews for Michael Wolff’s bombshell book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House that do not comply with company guidelines.

Source: Amazon deletes reviews of Michael Wolff’s book about Trump | Daily Mail Online
Last fall, Amazon deleted 1-star reviews from Hillary Clinton’s book.
Two thoughts on this: (1) Fake reviews are to online commerce what propaganda bots are to social media, and (2) the accuracy of selecting which reviews to delete is not great, meaning many legitimate reviews get thrown out.
This points to the problem of thinking that “bad content actors” can be addressed with more software and machine learning algorithms. Further, once censorship is run by software, think of the possibilities to rewrite and delete en masse!
This week, for example, “Amazon frightened many conservative authors this week in a mass deletion of reviews. Some authors lost almost 100 reviews on their published works. Others lost all the reviews they had ever written on Amazon. Some lost both.”
Was this due to a rogue Amazon employee? Or was this due to software? We do not know. But actions like these diminish the usefulness of all things Internet related.
Imagine the possibilities where just two mega corporations control the flow of ideas online using automated systems. We end up with 1984 on steroids!

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