Can you sue an Amazon reviewer for being stupid as well as fake? I hope so
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Version 0 of 1. You know, I might have got Amazon wrong. If reports by some workers are to be believed, it’s a cranky, Dickensian curmudgeon, existing as nothing more than a horrifying manifestation of the fan fiction that George Orwell once wrote about his local Argos. But, sometimes, Amazon’s ruthlessness can be its biggest strength. Because Amazon is attempting to sue its own reviewers. This is a ballsy move, but one that needed to happen. Because there’s only one thing in the world worse than Amazon, and that’s all the people who have written a review on Amazon. These people are ham-handed ninnies. They are furious twerps who spend their lives barking a broken stream of wrongheaded, unrelated, upper-case almost-words at the internet because they don’t understand the ending of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. To be fair, Amazon is only suing fake reviewers, just over 1,000 bored opportunists who have advertised, on sites such as Fiverr, their ability to write glowing, five-star reviews for products they’ve never seen in return for cash. These cockamamie reviews – written to fluff up a product’s appeal and increase sales – go against everything Amazon stands for. In its complaint, the company argued that fake reviews can “significantly undermine the trust that consumers and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers place in Amazon, which in turn tarnishes Amazon’s brand”. But hopefully this is just the start of a much longer process. Hopefully, having cleansed its site of fake reviewers, Amazon will turn its guns on actual reviewers. You suspect that when the site started publishing customer reviews it was hoping to provide the unvarnished, unfiltered thoughts of high-level critical thinkers with extensive hands-on experience. This hasn’t worked out. Amazon’s reviews are full of the impotent howls of people who are only on Amazon because they can’t work out the Daily Mail’s arrow-based comment-rating system. But even though they are the worst things on the internet, Amazon reviews can be weirdly persuasive. I recently toyed with the idea of purchasing the four-disc box set of Coppola’s restoration of The Godfather on Blu-ray. Then I read the one-star review left by SS Adams in January 2008, which confidently stated that “I GOT THE GODFARTHER TRILOGY VIDEO BOX SET AND I CAN ASURE YOU THE FIRST FILM IS NOT THE SAME AS THE VIDEO”. I didn’t know what Adams was going on about, but he seemed so angry that I would have been a fool to ignore him. Instead, I spent my money on Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 after reading actual five-star praise for the film such as “I think that Mall Cop 1 was a lot better than 2 but can’t grumble it was sill good” and “The item came on time and works fine no problems at all”. I haven’t watched it yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to have a great time. Amazon reviews have only been useful as meme-lite clickbait fodder whenever the internet has decided to gang up on a product that doesn’t meet its vigorous standards. For example, when Bic introduced pens for women, people lined up to complain ironically that they weren’t pink enough, and everyone had lots of fun self-righteously nodding at it for three seconds before they all drifted off to scowl at something else that could distract them from the clanging emptiness of life. There was also the time a reviewer said a notebook I intended to buy was disappointingly small. I didn’t believe them. It really was disappointingly small. I should have listened to that reviewer. But only that reviewer. Thanks to this lawsuit, I’ve actually found myself rooting for Amazon. For the first time, I’ve found myself wishing that an internet company would be more intimidatingly draconian. Can you sue a reviewer for being stupid as well as fake? I hope so. I want Amazon to hunt down these morons and take them out with maximum prejudice. I want Amazon to set a precedent here and rid the internet of all reviews. It would improve my life exponentially. Sure, TripAdvisor would be much better if it tackled all the nasty, spiteful fake reviews left by rivals and competitors with ulterior motives. But think how much better it would be if it also tackled all the nasty, spiteful real reviews that were left by entitled, perfectionist, arsehole customers with impossible standards and such a lack of meaning in their lives that they’ve sunk as low as writing TripAdvisor reviews. Imagine how amazing TripAdvisor would be if it was just a bald list of hotels, with no accompanying information whatsoever? This is my dream. Then, and only then, could we finally focus our collective legal might on those who deserve it most, by which I mean online commenters with whom I don’t particularly agree at any given time. What’s that, ID5350396? The column I wrote about my doppelganger four months ago was three minutes of your life that you won’t get back? Tell that to my lawyer, numbnuts. And, Jus_sayin, whoever you are, try telling me that I need a shower based on a photo taken a fortnight after my son was born when you’re staring down the barrel of a class-action lawsuit. And to whoever said about six years ago that I looked a bit like Gary Busey – well, yes, you’ve got a point. But still, I’m on to you. And then, with the internet finally free from scoundrels and liars and ne’er-do-wells, I would be able to sit back and watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 in peace. Apparently, it’s really good. |