A friend sent me this New York Times article about a "hate campaign" orchestrated on the book reviews website, GoodReads (acquired by Amazon a while back, no surprise), that allegedly suppressed sales of a new book.
I'm definitely a biased observer here since I have authored two books, and am affected by online book reviews. I also have emotional responses towards negative reviews, and like other humans, I exercise far less scrutiny of positive reviewers. It's a difficult issue to grapple with, and instead of offering conclusions, I want to suggest some topics for discussion.
(This is an example of a 1-star review on Amazon. When I wrote this post, the GoodReads site was malfunctioning and no reviews would load for me on multiple browsers. In my experience, GoodReads reviewers give fewer stars relative to Amazon reviewers.)
(A) The gripe that the negative reviewers published their opinions even before the book's publication date.
By itself, this is an invalid complaint, because publishers routinely send out advanced copies to friendly reviewers who are expected to help generate buzz prior to and leading up to the publication date. The real gripe is that they don't want to hear negative buzz, but if in an alternate universe, it's not a "hate campaign" but a "love campaign", I don't think this gripe would emerge.
Should there be an embargo on all reviews before the publication date?
The novel was published on June 6, 2023. The first review on Amazon was on June 6, 2023. Of the nine reviews posted on the first day, four were 5 stars, three 4 stars, and none below 3 stars. As of this writing, about 25% of the total reviews are below 3 stars. Who are the first-day reviewers? Should there be a reasonable X number of days to allow people to buy the book, read it, and write a review?
(B) The gripe that the negative reviewers objected merely to the outline of the book, and have not read the book itself.
According to the journalist, after the friendly reviewers put up a summary of the plot of the book on GoodReads, some unsettled readers wrote bad reviews because they hate the concept. This gripe is more valid. But... realistically, how many of the people who write reviews (including positive ones) have read the book? How much of the book must be read to be considered "qualified" to have an opinion? Did the famous people who put up blurbs on the book covers read the books first page to last?
The same question can be asked of not just early reviewers but any reviewers.
(C) The gripe that GoodReads do not ban these allegedly invalid reviews or reviewers.
The problem is how to set the censorship criteria. Should the authors and their publicists have the right to decide which reviewers or reviews are invalid?
Take, for example, the criterion that GoodReads should ban reviewers because they have not read the book. How is GoodReads going to know that? Do the publishers send GoodReads a list of names to whom they have sent advanced copies? What if one of the advanced readers pass the book on to someone else, who then write a review after reading the book?
If someone puts up a positive review after reading just the first 10 pages, is the review valid?
Take the other example of banning all reviews before the publication date. Surely, the publishers didn't mean that because they actively seek out advance praise. Emphasis on the word praise.
My own favorite censorship criterion is to delete all content-empty reviews. You routinely see reviews that have no value at all - "This ia a wonderful book", "This book is terrible. I hate it!" Having read the review, I have gained no appreciation for whether the reviewer read one page of it. But be careful what I reap! There are at least as many content-empty positive reviews as there are negative ones.
Here are two examples from Amazon:
Should online platforms censor content? This is a challenging question.
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The journalists lamented that the book in question sold only 1,000 copies in the first 10 days, attributing the supposedly poor performance to the "hate campaign". Too bad the readers who purchased the book did not organize a "love campaign" on GoodReads.
The same happened to Imdb reviews - Amazon owns that too.
Posted by: Tipi | 07/06/2023 at 04:52 PM
Another censorship criterion which seems wise to adopt today: delete all reviews containing the string "regenerate response" or "as an AI language model".
Posted by: Antonio | 07/09/2023 at 11:44 AM