Amazon is clamping down on internet trolls in the customer review section for a controversial new book about President Donald Trump.
The e-commerce giant is deleting reviews for Michael Wolff’s bombshell book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House that do not comply with company guidelines.
The company did not reveal how many reviews it deleted, according to Quartz.
Amazon is clamping down on internet trolls in the customer review section for author Michael Wolff’s (right) controversial new book about President Donald Trump (left)
Wolff’s book is No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list since its release on Friday
In an apparent effort to prevent the discourse in the review section from deteriorating, Amazon is limiting customer reviews only to those who are ‘verified’ to have bought the book
But the fact that the number of reviews for such a popular book – nearly 800 as of Saturday evening – is relatively low shows that the site is careful about allowing anyone to post comments on the politically charged topic that is the Trump presidency.
The site appears to have learned its lesson from last September, when it removed hundreds of one-star views for Hillary Clinton’s memoir.
The poor reviews appeared within hours of the publication of What Happened, a 512-page book in which she tries to set out why she lost the US presidential election to Trump.
It was published on September 12. By the next morning there were more than 1,500 reviews on Amazon.com, most of which were either glowing or scathing.
The e-commerce giant is deleting reviews for Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House that do not comply with company guidelines and carefully editing
Quartz, which analysed the reviews, said that of the 1,500-odd original reviews, ‘only 338 were from users with verified purchases of the book’.
The book’s publisher at Simon & Schuster, Jonathan Karp, said: ‘It seems highly unlikely that approximately 1,500 people read Hillary Clinton’s book overnight and came to the stark conclusion that it is either brilliant or awful.’
Amazon said at the time that reviews are designed to help customers make purchase decisions and it’s not the company’s role to decide what customers would find helpful in reviews.
The ex-first lady and Democratic candidate’s book features a series of digs at Trump, with Mrs Clinton describing her election foe at one point as a ‘creep’ who made her skin crawl.
In total, the president’s name is mentioned 536 times.
Wolff’s book appears to have generated as much – if not more – buzz than Clinton’s memoir.
Yet there are fewer reviews of the book on Amazon after its initial release on Friday compared to the number of reviews for Clinton’s book.
In an apparent effort to prevent the discourse in the review section from deteriorating, Amazon is limiting customer reviews only to those who are ‘verified’ to have bought the book.