Amazon.com Fraudulently Claimed I Violated Community Guidelines & Removed All My Book Reviews From Web Site

I have been posting book reviews on Amazon for many years, always buying the books at the site to get the cachet of “Verified purchase”. My efforts resulted in more than thirty reviews appearing on Amazon, many rated as either “Top Positive Review” or “Top Critical Review”. But when I submitted a review of “The Last Politician” by Franklin Foer, I got a terse email from Amazon that it could not be posted “because it doesn’t meet our guidelines for one or more of these reasons: Profanity, Harassment, Hate Speech, Sexual Content, Illegal Activity, Private Information”. This had never happened before, and I was quite surprised. I went to the link that showed the “Community Guidelines” and read all six pages, scratching my head, trying to figure what I’d done wrong and then I realized the issue was politics. The person checking my review was apparently an extreme liberal so I made some changes that I thought might let my piece “pass” and I resubmitted it. But I soon realized this was a waste of time because I could make changes piecemeal again and again, but without knowing exactly what in my 850 word review was the ”problem”, my efforts would be fruitless.

How could I get the nameless and faceless Amazon person behind the “wizard’s curtain” to tell me what to do? I remembered seeing on my “Author’s Page” a place where I could recommend books. I’d never used this feature before but now got the idea to cite Franklin Foer’s book as a “Recommendation”, writing in the comments: “I wrote a review of this book that did not pass the Amazon Moderator and I hope they will tell me what to change.” This was an act of desperation because I truly wanted to get my review posted and I was willing to make rewrites but had to have some guidance, sort of like we got from our high school English teacher who would take a red pencil and underline the problem.

Apparently, my ploy with Amazon backfired because I soon got an email saying my post was “outside of our guidelines” and “consider this to be a first warning.” Amazon’s ire was about the book recommendation I’d put on my author’s page (specifically the comments showing Amazon in a bad light) since this was the only “post” I’d ever made other than book reviews.

This was going nowhere, and I was not going to play Amazon’s games. I replied to the email, saying, “if you cannot tell me what I am doing wrong I will cancel my book advertising, Amazon Prime, and the Amazon prime credit card and quit making purchases from Amazon.” Six days later I got a reply email saying, “You have repeatedly posted content that violates our Community Guidelines . . . [and therefore] we’ve removed your ability to participate in Community features.” This was untrue because I’d only made one post, the one where I said, “I hope they [Amazon Moderator] will tell me what to change [in the review that had been rejected].”

Unfortunately, all the book reviews I’d posted on Amazon over the years were deleted. This was quite disappointing because I’d spent hundreds of dollars on dozens of books, reading them closely over countless hours in order to write honest and informed book reviews and now my work had been erased. I truly doubt that anyone has put more effort (both in the reading and the writing) into creating a book review than I have. Amazon’s actions have not only hurt me but are a disservice to millions of readers who rely on quality reviews to make wise decisions in their book purchases.

As I said earlier, I’ve submitted critical assessments of other books to Amazon and never had a problem and I must conclude the current issue is over politics, simply having a different opinion. While I did say some positives about the author, I also faulted him for being almost sycophantic toward Biden. What he wrote was an uncritical fluff piece and I called it as such.

The review, as written, would be passable to any reasonable person and there is nothing out of bounds in it. I read the book thoroughly and wrote an honest, critical review with no malice or evil intent. For anyone interested, a google search of “book reviews of ‘The Last Politician’” will take you to Goodreads where you’ll find my piece and you can decide for yourself.