Amazon’s Battle with Troll Reviews
When making purchasing decisions, people often find product reviews to be very insightful. In fact, we see that the bigger the purchase, the more time people spend browsing through different reviews and learning about people’s experiences with the product. This showcases the power of networks by highlighting how much buyers trust other people’s opinions on a certain product.
Unfortunately, this power is often exploited by Amazon users to influence buyers’ decisions on certain products by giving fake reviews. We have seen that, recently, with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s new book “Settle for More“, where many users decided to mass-downgrade the book, not for its low quality, but for political reasons. As The Daily Beast reports, on the day of the book’s publication, it garnered hundreds of one and two-star reviews on Amazon from suspiciously fast readers. Megyn Kelly’s shrewd attacks on Donald Trump’s personality and fit to rule the country created an outrage among Trump supporters that inspired this torpedo of “troll” reviews. It started on Reddit when a pro-Trump group “The Donald” urged its members to downgrade Kelly’s book.
Fortunately, troll users aren’t the only ones who realize the power of reviews on buyers. Amazon got itself in a long vicious fight with troll reviewers, and Megyn Kelly’s book is just one example. Amazon actively goes through reviews and deletes ones that seem to be fake. Looking at Kelly’s book reviews, for example, we notice that at one time it had more than 450 reviews, but that later went down to 138 and then just 42 reviews. When the troll users noticed that, they decided to fight back. One Reddit user posted “AMAZON JUST REMOVED ALL NEGATIVE REVIEWS FROM MEGYN KELLY’S BOOK! KEEP GIVING IT ONE STAR!”. Within minutes, reviews went back up from less than 50 to more than 200. And on it goes…
Battles like these reinforce our understanding of networks and remind us of the influence our surroundings have on us. We are almost always more inclined to go with an option that is endorsed by others. Two products could have massively different sales numbers if one has a higher acceptance rate from society, even if they were the exact same product! With the rise of social media, this effect became even more exploitable, where fake information and promises can effectively skew people’s decisions.
Sources:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/16/amazon-battles-trolls-over-megyn-kelly-book.html
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/megyn-kelly-amazon-trolls-1-star/2016/11/16/id/759295/