So, Amazon is suing its reviewers. Relax, Muggle4571. The company is not focusing on idiots. Return to the keyboard, BaboonMunch. The campaign is not aimed at old-school trolls. Any such legal purge of the comments gutter would be financially impractical and would leave Amazon with about three lonesome reviewers.
Jeff Bezos and his people are going after "fake reviewers". Hang on. Doesn't that cover just about everybody? Who uses Amazon and, after posting their real name and location, sets out to deliver measured consideration of books, films and fungal nail treatments (there are 1,031 notices for Scholl's 3.8 ml version). It's not as if you're being paid to do this.
There's the rub. Amazon is taking action against about 1,100 defendants who, it claims, have taken money to write positive reviews of products. There are lessons here about the state of the virtual universe. It seems sites exist that act as an agency for people who want small tasks done elsewhere in the digital ether.
Uprooting the ecosystem
If you have a self-published book you’d like pumped, then such entities will slip fivers to willing conspirators. (Amusingly, it was ecstatic reviews of life-changing USB cables that tipped Amazon off.) A statement explained: “Amazon is bringing this action to protect its customers from this misconduct, by stopping defendants and uprooting the ecosystem in which they participate.” Oo, “ecosystem,” no less? Get you with your elegant metaphors.
There is, I suppose, a distinction between gibberish typed by independent users and gibberish typed by paid stooges, but Amazon must be aware that online notices will still be madly unreliable.
It is the same everywhere. The main problem with reviews on websites is that they are written by the sorts of people who write reviews on websites. Most of these folk are workably sane and reasonably well meaning. There is, however, on the fringes, a disproportionate number of loons, racists, crap stirrers, sadists, anti-Semites, fascists, communists, extreme libertarians, Esperanto enthusiasts, crypto-anarchists and people who don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re”.
One Twitter account devotes itself to unhinged reviews of movies on Amazon. "Great until they get into the homo part," Douglas Appleton remarks of The Imitation Game. One can only imagine the reviews that moderators have deleted.
There are fatheads among the critics who work for (ahem) newspapers and broadcasters. There are more than a few who have only sketchy knowledge of the subject about which they profess to be experts, but those writers have to put their own names alongside the notices. They must explain lunges into sun worship or Zoroastrianism. It is harder for them to big up a self-help book by their hairdresser or an alien invasion film by their cousin.
Most visitors to sites such as Amazon know to expect biased and deranged reviews. Think back to the "scandal" concerning writer Orlando Figes at the start of this decade. Then professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, Figes eventually admitted to posting positive Amazon reviews of his own work and negative notices of colleagues (we can probably say "rivals" in this context) such as Rachel Polonsky and Robert Service.
How you responded depended very much on what age you were. Older academics pressed handkerchiefs to heads and slumped into Restoration swoons. Younger observers, weaned on the internet’s evil ways, rather expect authors to pseudonymously praise their own work (although slagging off seemed less understandable).
Who can find it in their hearts to deride the folk behind no-budget films when they take to comments sections and talk up their work? Eighteen reviews will appear, each employing eerily consistent syntax and punctuation.
Too much information
The mistake they always make is to include too much information. “I went to this film because I heard it had won best editing at the Nyíregyháza Film Festival and because it features great harmonica playing by Sean Hooligan. These critic are bias and pretensious. It is a great watch for all.” That sort of thing.
Teenage boys habitually mark down female-friendly films on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Some nut on TripAdvisor is always inventing a rat in the lavatory while pretending to stay at the Chateau du Posh. Video-game sites are perennially under assault from special-interest commentators. And so on.
This corner of the new digital democracy has opened us up to fresh schools of corruption and deception. The only person you can trust is your pal in the pub. Unless she’s the director’s sister-in-law.