A Case Study of Commodity Fetishism in the Age of Communicative Capitalism
Amazon has a serious problem with fake reviews populating their website. So much so that Forbes, NYMag, NYPost, C|Net, and Fortune are all writing about it.
After reviewing findings from data-based research by Ming Ooi, one of the co-founders of Fakespot, he offers this blunt assessment of Amazon’s reviews ecosystem: “About 40 percent of reviews we see on Amazon are unreliable.”
This video also goes details the issue:
In this blog post I’m going to examine to distinct types of fake reviews, examine it’s commercial and political effects and then outline how it is that Amazon should be handling them.
Why go through the work of explaining this?
For one, as someone that has almost 150 book reviews on their website as a means of monetization, I find sending referral traffic to a website with a consumer rating function that has been hijacked by marketers to be highly unethical.
Secondly, I find the unresponsiveness of Amazon to taking simple steps to prevent this to be reflective of a corporate environment that
Let me give you two case study examples of products that I’ve recently come across that illustrate what I mean.
Freewrite: The Juicero of Word Processing
I use the same computer for word processing as I do for my marketing business, I know how susceptible to distraction the various alerts I have set up and immediate access to the internet can be. Thus when I first saw the Kickstarter ad for the Freewrite I was interested. I clicked the sponsored post in my Facebook feed, and began to read their promotional literature. As I did, my initial excitement on a new tool faded on learning of it’s features and price.
Unlike others that have written negative reviews of the product after using it, I could tell without even investing $550 into it that it was, quoting Mashable, pretentious hipster nonsense.
Identifying Fake Amazon Reviews
Leading up to Christmas, I started to see ads announcing that the second generation of the product had been released. Hopeful at first that maybe they’d changed their product to address what I and others saw as flaws in it’s features, I was disappointed to learn that they hadn’t. And I was also confused. Fully aware that my preferences aren’t universal, I still surprised at the high number of gushing customer review ratings on Amazon.
When I started to dig deeper I noticed a number of abnormalities in those people that were reviewing it. For one, you’ll notice that a large number of the 5 star reviews are all written by people that have only ever reviewed one product: The FreeWrite.
I didn’t take screenshots of them all, but if you look at some of the other reviews you’ll notice that a lot of them also have only one or two reviews for items that were written years ago.
31 of the 42 reviews, or 74% of the 5 star reviews for FreeWrite all occur within a nine day period – between November 21st and November 30th 2016. Here’s the data from Amazon that I collected should you want to review the numbers yourself. Many of them have a length and style that is directly mirrors FreeWrite’s own marketing material and at least two reviews come from those that were incentivized to write it based upon being given the product for free. Why else, after all, would someone write a 2,300 word review of it?
Marketing Authenticity Whilst Acting Suspiciously
Above I said that FreeWrite is like the Juicero. How so? Well, they both created much hyped, over-priced products that poorly deliver on their promises. Like Douglas Evans, founder of Juicero, they then moved on to another project that is at it’s core, well, ridiculous.
Evans is now marketing the unproven benefits of the dubiously named raw water he sells while AstroHaus tried to bring to market ClapBoss – a device that mandates you spend money and time programming a device that you can just as easily do without. It wasn’t just schadenfreude that made me happy to see that this project didn’t get funded, but a deep and genuine disdain for marketing language that mobilizes concepts such as “Freedom” and “Control Over Your Life” to encourages people to buy products such as these. I’d go so far as to venture that any person that would prefer a $550 FreeWrite to $510 dollars worth of books and some notebooks and pen or word processing software like Scrivener aren’t real writers. That said, let me add I’ve never used Scrivener, I wasn’t paid to point this out and that if you ascribe to a historical materialist view of the world you’ll notice a troubling paradox in the reviews of products that could actually lead to freedom and control over your life.
Financial Incentive Not Sole Factor For Fake Reviews
As a subject area expert, George Ciccariello-Maher frequently writes, lectures and speaks on the subject of Venezuela and American political economy. One of my favorite history books of the past several years, in fact, was We Created Chavez by GCM. In my review of the book I favorably compared it’s prose to that found in C. L. R. James’ work on the Haitian Revolution The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a historian that’s quoted several times in the book.
Full disclosure, thought we’ve never met – we did both present research at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism: Surplus, Solidarity and Sufficiency 2013 Conference at UMASS Amherst – me critically defending the democratically elected government of Venezuela and Bolivarianism, he on decolonizing dialectics.
For those familiar with American history and political economy and that aren’t white nationalists, the tweets for which he received negative press was funny, neigh, hilarious. Those that didn’t like it – which was much of the commentariat – didn’t get it and thus misrepresented views. In an interview GCM gave with The Inquirer, he explains as follows (Link to BET’s coverage of the State Farm Insurance tweet added by me):
“On Christmas Eve, I sent a satirical tweet about an imaginary concept, ‘white genocide,'” For those who haven’t bothered to do their research, ‘white genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies (and most recently, against a tweet by State Farm Insurance). It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I’m glad to have mocked it.”
Historical Ignorance and Revisionism in Amazon Reviews
Following this the White Nationalist press got upset and mobilized their base, which also happens to have intersectional affinities with Venezuelans in Miami. The above screen shot shows how Google searches for “White Genocide” and “George Ciccariello-Maher” both peaked following his tweet going viral.
The ramifications of the Tweet wasn’t just Google searches, however, but a campaign of harassment and death threats that lead to GCM being placed on leave and an attempt at delegitimizing his academic work via the means that most used online means of commerce in America – Amazon.
Amazon Reviews and The World Turned Inside Out
The above Amazon user yentl’s sole contributions to Amazon are typical of others like it in level of insight and engagement following the uproar over two tweets by GCM. In fact, the seven reviews by yentl shown above are all for books written, translated or co-edited by George Ciccariello-Maher and are all the same – “It makes me want to Vomit!”. Similar depth of insight and engagement with the text abounds in other reviews.
I didn’t take the time to go through all of his books on Amazon, but it’s worth noting that 42 of the 63 review for We Created Chavez occur within a one week period in March of 2017 and a 3 day period in December of 2016. For those that want to check my methods, feel free to review this data sheet I made.
Amazon and Authentic Reviews
With these two cases in mind, it’s easy to see that the majority of positive reviews are done from financial motivation and those that are negative are ideological in origin. It’s also easy to see how Amazon can help prevent these sorts of false distortions of reality from being considered real.
For one monitoring negative or positive spikes in reviews and flagging them for review prior to publication.
Secondly Amazon needs to take Abuse Reports seriously. I’ve reported a number of reviews that are clearly either spam or ideologically motivated only to see that several days, weeks, months later that they remain online as a genuine “experience” of the product.
Since Amazon claims they want to be the brand of Customer Experience, they need to address this. Now. While the tenor of political discourse is no where near as bad as it is elsewhere, there needs to be a greater degree of vigilance to ensure honest communication about the merits of products and worldview. What’s at stake here isn’t just about whether or not someone chooses to buy something – but the need to be vigilant towards a platform with “democratic aspirations” from inadvertently promoting the widening and deepening of false consciousness.