Amazon removes thousands of reviews of Hillary Clinton’s memoir about lost election

Hundreds of one-star reviews of Hillary Clinton’s memoir What Happened, which appeared online within hours of the 512-page book’s publication, have been removed from Amazon.

What Happened, in which Clinton gives her account of the 2016 presidential campaign, was published on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, there were more than 1,500 reviews of the novel on Amazon.com, the majority either glowing or scathing.

The book’s publisher at Simon&Schuster, Jonathan Karp, said: “It seems highly unlikely that around 1,500 people read Hillary Clinton’s book overnight and came to the stark conclusion that it is either brilliant or awful.”

Quartz, which tracked the reviews in detail, said that of the 1,500-odd original reviews, “only 338 were from users with verified purchases of the book”. At the time, What Happened had an overall rating of 3.2 stars, but Quartz points out that “average rating for reviews from unverified purchases was a 2.3, while the average from a real purchase of the book was 4.9”.

By Thursday, only 581 customer reviews remained, 95 per cent of which were five-star. Amazon said on Thursday morning that “we remove customer reviews that violate our community guidelines”. These include the stipulation that “when we find unusually high numbers of reviews for a product posted in a short period of time, we may restrict the number of non-Amazon Verified Purchase reviews on that product”.

Amazon said customers’ reviews “must be related to the product and are designed to help ... purchase decisions. In the case of a memoir, the subject of the book is the author and their views. It’s not our role to decide what a customer would view as helpful or unhelpful in making their decision. We do however have mechanisms in place to ensure that the voices of many do not drown out the voices of a few.”

Karp said that Simon&Schuster had hoped that online commentary would “reflect opinions of people who have actually read the book”.