How Amazon's Algorithms Curated a Dystopian Bookstore

One has a confident-looking doctor on the cover, but the author doesn’t have an MD—a quick Google search reveals that he’s a medical journalist with the “ThinkTwice Global Vaccine Institute.” Scrolling through a simple keyword search for “vaccine” in Amazon’s top-level Books section reveals anti-vax literature prominently marked as “#1 Best Seller” in categories ranging from Emergency Pediatrics to History of Medicine to Chemistry. However, a glance at Reviewmeta, a site that aims to help customers assess whether reviews are legitimate, suggests that over 1,000 may be suspicious in terms of time frame, language, and reviewer behavior.Once relegated to tabloids and web forums, health misinformation and conspiracies have found a new megaphone in the curation engines that power massive platforms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Sometimes, as with the anti-vax movement and some alternative-health communities, large groups of true believers coordinate to catapult their preferred content into the first page of search results.Amazon reviews appear to figure prominently in the company’s ranking algorithms. While writing this article, I experimented with the listing tool for Kindle books; the keywords and categories are entirely self-selected.With a product base as large as Amazon’s, it’s probably a challenge for the company to undertake any kind of review process. Users looking to buy health books on Amazon should be afforded the same standard.No major platform is immune to problems with gameable algorithms.