Amazon deletes reviews with no explanation
I bought a lot of stuff on Amazon and left a lot of positive reviews (24 to be precise). One day, randomly, they all got deleted from my account. Of course I contacted them and received back a meaningless email that doesn’t say anything about the reasons for that decision. While I couldn’t give less of a crap about the reviews themselves, I think that this is an unacceptable attack to freedom of expression. As a user I want to help businesses selling on Amazon (and I spent a good deal of time writing them), after Amazon monopolized the e-commerce. But apparently I can’t, because if you are too good of a reviewer you get blocked. And in this unregulated jungle it’s not even in my rights to know why they did this. My reviews were absolutely polite and positive. I must have been caught erroneously by their ML models. However, not even an explanation, all my reviews were deleted - boom - gone - kaput. Not cool. This is the real cyber bullyism that all of us working in the field should be aware of. Awareness, ethic, and agreement to build what’s humanly right is what we should do. Not just talk about stocks trying to get rich soon and dirty our soul for good. Had it happened at Apple I would consider leaving the company. Apple is not perfect but thankfully it’s far from this shit. TC 220
im confused on why this is such a big deal to you
Because it’s manipulative of both the reviewers and the customers. If they don’t like a reviewer for whatever reason they just shut down the reviews. What bothers me the most is their bully attitude for which they don’t even provide an explanation. Freedom of expression is a fundamental right in this country, it’s found in the first amendment, and when you, as a company, take down some text written by a customer, and you do it with zero explanation as of why you did that, well for me that’s really not ok. A company should not have the right of choosing what reviews to display and what reviews to block, unless offensive, disrespectful etc etc, and they IMO they should be obliged in providing a clear explanation following their action.
I think this is worthy of discussion/alerting others so they are aware. A lot of us rely on reviews to decide our purchases so it helps to know Amazon's practices on filtering out reviews. Even if you're not "upset" about it, it's worth letting people know about it.
It doesn't look right from customer obsession point of view. Do you mind sharing any feedback and what customer service say? And did you have an activity on your account that can show up as a bot?
Sorry, how is you review being deleted bullyism??????? Ok so some ML algorithm probably misidentified your review as fake or paid. Fake and paid reviews are a big problem and there are a lot of efforts to eliminate them, I'm sure those efforts are not perfect. But bullyism? Come on. That's RIDICULOUS.
I agree, I have been using Amazon since 2013 in India, and must have left several hundreds of review by now, I never noticed any review being deleted
I think OP’s problem is not the actual deleting of reviews but the fact that Amazon did not offer a satisfactory explanation for their action.
The no explanation part is ridiculous and unacceptable
Why?
Holy fuck, do they only hire you if you are a psychopath at Amazon? I bet you won the first prize for mental idiot! Do they give you more RSUs for keeping being an idiot or are you a natural on your own?
You’re right OP. This is a real problem as the market runs out of competitors for Amazon. They can really push customers and merchants around.
In all honesty it was hard for me to relate to this kind of stories that we all hear from time to time. Until it happened to me as well! It’s very frustrating being assigned into a predefined category by a fucking crappy algorithm and receiving a shameless empty answer from the company or no answer at all. I paid for the items and it’s in my rights to be able to express my opinions on it. Now, this is just a very light example, I’m not being financially affected by this episode. But the same goes with sellers that can get their account suspended. Amazon should only provide the platform, not edit the content in such a unregulated and discriminatory fashion. Like Google should not be the one banning videos from YouTube. Because there is no infallible algorithm to distinguish between what’s true vs what’s fake, as there’s no infallible algorithm to determine whether my reviews were legit or fake. I still have all the items but I’m seriously considering returning all of them and closing the account. On eBay this wouldn’t happen, and they have the same things at cheaper price. Fuck this idea of “convenience” so deeply injected in our society by companies that are so good at making profit by depriving us of our humanity. I can wait a week or two for my items, it’s even better sometime. If you think I’m exaggerating I don’t blame you. You’ll blame yourself just in a few years.
We tried that, it didn't work. You will end up with dozens of fake reviews for every real one.
It might be some intern who ran some query at wrong place.
And that would be fine! But guys.. ask questions, verify whether I’m a paid reviewer or not, ask me to take a pic of the items to see if I still have them! Idk how, but I’m sure that if you focus on understanding whether I’m a legit reviewer or not would give your own business much more value that just blindly blocking whomever tries to help other people by spending time posting reviews.
You want us to hire an army of people to do this, whereas we want to scale it with algorithms and keep prices lower. Ok, so maybe the algorithm went wrong in your case and I'm sure there are merits to less automation but I'm still not sure why you consider it "bullying". You seem pretty butthurt.
This doesn’t sound right and should not be happening. Please DM if you’re okay to share anything I can use to get to the bottom of this. 1. To make this right for you. 2. To ensure it’s not something that’s flying undetected and affecting many others too
He's doing reviews for money / refunds. I'm sure you have teams that track this I have a ton of friends who admit to getting full refunds for 5 star reviews and then Amazon always finds out and wipes their reviews.
Eh been doing the scam reviews for over 2 years now and have yet to be caught
Your review was so long with so many great pictures that the Amazon marketing cloud was running out of space.
I got so upset reading this I just gave my resignation. Thank you.
If you don’t get the problem you really belong there
Monopoly and bullying is bad indeed. Like banning apps with no rules and charge 30% of unreasonable and non negotiable fees