Hillary Clinton's detractors just can't quit her — in addition to tweeting about her, bashing her on various internet forums, and calling her crooked every chance they get, they have now descended on Amazon, leaving one-star reviews of her new book, What Happened.
Clinton's tome about the election came out Sept. 12, and was an instant bestseller. Quartz reports that shortly before noon eastern time on Thursday, there were 1,669 reviews of the book on Amazon, with 50 percent one-star and 45 percent five-star. Most of the one-star reviews were left by unverified purchasers, meaning if they did buy the book it wasn't from Amazon; their comments were along the lines of "You lost. Get over it." By 3 p.m., it appeared Amazon had deleted more than 900 reviews; the company wouldn't confirm or deny this with Quartz, but did say the company has "mechanisms in place to ensure that the voices of many do not drown out the voices of a few and we remove customer reviews that violate our Community Guidelines."
It's not unusual for people to leave bad reviews about products they've never used, for whatever reason, and of course reviewers could have bought the book elsewhere and then posted on Amazon, but there were tons of red flags for What Happened, ReviewMeta owner Tommy Noonan told Quartz. First, there were more than 1,000 reviews from unverified customers, and after looking at their histories, many had never written a verified review.
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Now that it looks like Amazon is going to crack down on fake What Happened reviews, it's time for the anti-Hillary brigade to come up with new ways to pass the time — there's always learning how to say "Lock her up!" in multiple languages, rearranging your Make America Great Again hat collection, and finally taking that PhotoShop class to improve those meme-making skills.
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