Barely out, Olivier Véran’s book Beyond the waves *, in which he recounts his management of the Covid-19 crisis, caused a stir among commentators. Especially on the Amazon platform. According to several viral tweets, the e-commerce giant would have “censored” negative comments published about the book of the former Minister of Health, now government spokesperson.
A tweet, shared 4,000 times, thus shows the evolution, between September 10 and September 11, of the note given to this book on Amazon: it would have gone from 1.5/5 to 5/5. The cause, according to Internet users? The removal of negative comments, which would have favored this good score.
“Amazon, we are doing propaganda,” asks a Twitter user, who posts screenshots of negative comments that have allegedly been deleted. “Amazon removes the negative comments from Olivier Véran’s book, believes the essayist and support of Eric Zemmour Philippe Herlin. It’s like with vaccines, there are no side effects. »
FAKE OFF
Contacted by 20 minutes, Amazon confirms that it has deleted comments that violated the rules in force on the e-commerce platform. “We have strict review policies and proactively remove reviews that violate these guidelines,” an Amazon spokesperson said.
The platform explains that it does not delete reviews on “the basis of the number of stars awarded or whether it is positive or negative”. Concerning Olivier Véran’s book, the opinions were “not in conformity” with the community guidelineswhich brings together a set of rules prohibiting, for example, repetitive content, insults, attacks on people or defamatory content.
Amazon did not want to specify what rules exactly were applied to delete the comments, nor authenticate the screenshots of the comments deleted and distributed on social networks.
An “unusual activity” on the comments
Due to “unusual activity” on comments, the e-commerce giant has also decided to limit the number of comments regarding the sale of this book. The verified purchase procedure has been put in place: only people who have actually purchased the book on the platform will be able to comment.
The company also stresses that it “strongly prohibits” fake reviews and indicates that in 2020, it blocked more than 200 million reviews suspected of being false before they were seen by their customers.
* “Beyond the waves”, by Olivier Véran, ed. Robert Lafont, released September 8, 2022.