A five star review on Amazon is also a review in part of purchasing on Amazon. Amazon have an incentive to bump those scores up. They'll agressively remove any

A five star review on Amazon is also a review in part of purchasing on Amazon. Amazon have an incentive to bump those scores up. They'll agressively remove any bad reviews on little pretext and ignore utterly bogus 5 star reviews. This way, potential customers of Amazon are decieived into believing many more people are having excellent purchasing experiences using Amazon than is really the case. It's systemic. It's a deliberate false and misleading practise. I don't know what the law states or which ones might apply but on any ethical basis a pursued policy of deception like that to get sales is fraud. It's one of the many ugly things Amazon do with their resources rather than paying tax and acting decently. But they do use computers so nobody involved in public policy, law and enforcement can think about it at all. "I just mug them at the bus stop. It's legal because it's with a computer." Then of course we get the overreaction the other way from policy makers, that also gets captured by the big players like amazon, so it makes it even harder for smaller businesses, who pay workers and pay tax to compete. Libertarains and socialists have a lot in common to explore.