Amazon: Fake reviews can never replicate real venom or praise

For word-of-mouth to work, the mouths have to belong to real people

A woman browse a book shop, seeing what cover grabs her fancy (Getty Images)

The one thing that is not in short supply online is opinion. No matter whether it is careful consideration from a position of expertise, or a random spasm of existentialist crisis which can only be assuaged by swearing at strangers on Twitter, everyone has a view on everything.

And although not every view is expressed with clarity or civility, you tend to assume that the commentator holds the opinion they’re expressing.

But more and more of the opinions which appear in the “user reviews” categories of websites from TripAdvisor to Amazon are starting to look a little factory-made.

And now Amazon is fighting back: for the second time this year, it is taking legal action against those who offer to write reviews for money, typically as little as $5 (£3.24) per review. It is suing more than 1,100 people who have proffered their services through a website called Fiverr.com (an address which follows the universal rule that anything which looks like a typo is now inevitably an internet start-up worth millions). And the detail of deceit is almost commendable: some fake-reviewers even buy the item they’re reviewing (refunded by their paymaster, of course) to create a realistic paper trail.

Much as I like the idea of a cabal of desperate novelists paying out pittances from their meagre advances for reviews which praise their plotting and characterisation, I suspect the products in question are more likely to be those with a higher profit margin than books: electrical goods, for example. Although the temptation is certainly there for authors to acquire or construct fake reviews: remember Orlando Figes, caught out pseudonymously slagging off his rivals’ books and praising his own on Amazon.

Most authors yearn for good feedback, but also know the truth: positive reviews need to come from a lot of real, live readers. The kind who tell everyone how great this book they’re reading is, and buy copies for friends for Christmas. For word-of-mouth to work, the mouths have to belong to real people, not ventriloquists’ dummies. Otherwise you just have words on an Amazon page that no one visits.

Many years ago, I had a stinker of a review posted on the Edinburgh Fringe website. The author was snidely furious about the number of times I mentioned my philosophy degree from Oxford in my show. It came as quite a surprise to me, since I don’t have a philosophy degree and I didn’t go to Oxford, and the show was about television detectives.

Because the review had clearly been written out of spite – and, crucially, by someone who hadn’t seen the show – it was easy for my producers to have it taken down. But had it been written more carefully, I would have had to tolerate it, unfair as it was. And I might well have been tempted to ask friends who’d seen the show to write nice reviews to counterbalance that malice.

It’s not such a big step from asking friends for support to buying reviews from strangers. And though Amazon says it’s only addressing “a handful of dishonest sellers and manufacturers”, I wonder how certain it can be. Perhaps the days of gatekeepers – where critics were paid by a publication (whose agenda was relatively obvious) to express their views – have been swapped for one where anonymity hides not just posters’ identities, but also their agenda.