Concerted Amazon Attacks

by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

An article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago raised an issue of the deliberate, concerted and malicious use of negative Amazon reviews to 'sink' a new book. 

The book in question was "Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson" by Randall Sullivan and apparently a group of Michael Jackson fans used Facebook and Twitter to solicit people to bombard Amazon with negative one-star reviews of the book in what appeared to be a concerted campaign to derail book sales. The result was that many favorable reviews were taken down and Amazon even removed the book from sale for a brief period. 

Needless to say the book did not achieve the book sales  anticipated (3,000 copies sold according to the NYT article compared to the 16,000 copies the publisher distributed to bookstores) despite high-profile promotion - the book was even selected by Amazon as one of the best books of the year. But books often fail to achieve anticipated sales, so who knows whether the 100+ one-star reviews were really responsible for the book's poor performance. The author's did however cite major concerns over the factually inaccurate nature of many of the negative reviews.  

Now there has been a lot of controversy recently about Amazon reviews, from authors using 'sock puppets' to write favorable reviews, to Amazon taking down or refusing to post genuine reviews. The specter of a deliberate and concerted campaign to attack a book muddies the 'Amazon review' water even further. There are those who state that it is almost impossible to distinguish a malicious campaign from genuine negative reviews and those who argue that people shouldn't be able to make flagrantly false comments and attacks that in effect suppress an author's right to free speech (then of course there are those who argue for the right of the reviewers to free speech). 

So what do you think? How should Amazon deal with the potential for deliberate malicious 'review' attacks?  How should authors deal with this issue and can Amazon really be expected to police this kind of thing?