Illustration by Dustin Elliott.

By Christopher Elliott
Guest Columnist

Amazon has removed all of Susan Deonier’s product reviews from the platform, but it won’t say why. Is there any way to get these comments restored?

Christopher Elliott

I recently received an abrupt, robotic removal of hundreds of customer reviews I’ve posted on Amazon since 2018. I’ve also been blocked from posting new reviews.

Amazon did not give me a specific reason for this action, and I’ve received no response to my respectful inquiries from any human at Amazon, including two letters I sent to the Amazon executives you list on your consumer advocacy site.

My detailed, voluntary reviews consumed more than 1,300 hours of my time. If any of my customer reviews have somehow violated Amazon’s community guidelines, I want to know what I did wrong. I also want the opportunity to rectify the situation by rewriting the offending reviews, so my 654 deleted reviews can be restored, and I can resume posting helpful reviews of the items I purchase on Amazon. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated. — Susan Deonier, Ontario, Ore.

At a minimum, Amazon should have told you why it deleted your reviews. But the company should also have a process for proving that you’re a real person and getting your reviews reinstated, and based on this case, I’m not sure if it does.

Why would Amazon arbitrarily remove all 654 product reviews without giving you a reason? That’s easy. Amazon is fighting a losing war against spammers and scammers who are trying to manipulate a product rating with bogus reviews. Your reviews must have triggered Amazon’s fraud detection algorithm, which looks for the telltale sign of a manufactured review — things like the use of superlatives or granting too many one-star or five-star reviews.

Once Amazon suspected your reviews of not being completely genuine, it cut off your account without debate.

“We have zero tolerance for fake reviews,” it told you in an email. “Our advanced technology and expert investigators stop the vast majority of attempts to publish fake reviews. We also take legal action against people and companies that buy and provide fake reviews.”

All Amazon would say is that your reviews violated its community guidelines. It didn’t say how.

I’ve seen this kind of thing before. A few years ago, Airbnb developed a system that screened its users for criminal records. Airbnb naively believed that it could simply ban these users without any appeal mechanism. They were wrong. The system had issues with false positives and tagging people who were accused, but not convicted, of minor crimes. Airbnb had to create a system to vet requests to reinstate their accounts, and it’s still far from perfect.

It’s possible that Amazon is in a similar situation. Then again, with the use of artificial intelligence increasing every day, it’s possible that the current system for vetting consumer reviews is hopelessly confused. Maybe it can’t tell a fake review from a real one. It apparently couldn’t in your case.

But the problem isn’t that Amazon is screening its product reviews. It is and it should. The problem is that it didn’t respond to your repeated requests to review your account. You put a lot of time and effort into reviewing these products and you didn’t even get paid for your work. Having Amazon cut you off like this feels insulting.

I publish the names of the Amazon executives on my consumer advocacy, Elliott.org. You could have continued escalating your requests until someone responded. But honestly, it should have never come to that, and Amazon can do better.

I contacted Amazon on your behalf. A few days later, Amazon restored your reviews without explanation.

“You accomplished in five days what I was unable to achieve during five months of fruitless attempts to get a response from anyone at Amazon,” you told me. “I am impressed and very grateful to you!”

Christopher Elliott is the founder of Elliott Advocacy  a nonprofit organization that helps consumers solve their problems. Email him at [email protected] or get help by contacting him.