Amazon blocks reviews of Pedro Sánchez’s new book due to avalanche of trolling | Technology

The online sales portal Amazon has decided to close comments on the latest book of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez. According to industry sources, the company made this decision due to the avalanche of content published on the web, believing that it generated polarization and did not refer to the product to be sold. The same sources assure that this is a common practice on large e-commerce sites, and that it is normal for comments to be reopened “after a certain time”.

Diploma Mainland and published by Peninsula, the volume that the author presented yesterday is a “personal chronicle” of the last legislature. “In the four years since Resistance ManualPedro Sánchez formed the first coalition government in Spain’s recent history, led the country through a pandemic, a war in Ukraine and its economic consequences across Europe, and faced numerous other crises, such as the eruption of a volcano in La Palma,” says the book’s summary on Amazon.

The comments that we can see a little further down, however, have little to do with this content. “Ridiculousness”, “Egolatras and comments in bad taste”, “Arrogant like him”, “Anti-literature in its purest form” or “The shame of others” are the titles of some of the first reviews published.

“Amazon customer reviews are designed to help customers make purchasing decisions and should reflect the customer’s actual experience with the product or service purchased,” the tech giant said in a statement. “At Amazon, we remove reviews that violate these guidelines and, in some cases, limit or remove reviews to protect the integrity of customer reviews.”

Companies like Amazon have teams that analyze comments on the products offered in order to prevent, among other things, illegal content from infiltrating them. The analysis is usually carried out by giving preference to reviews from verified buyers, so that the website provides an adequate customer experience.

When it is detected that the correlation between the date of publication of the product on the web and the number of comments is unusually high, as happened with Sánchez’s book, the product is studied. The idea, industry sources say, is that comments encourage or discourage purchasing, but do not serve as a platform for unrelated debate. There are exceptional cases in which it is decided to close comments. This happened, for example, two years ago with a book on covid flooded with negative comments from anti-vaccines.

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