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Thursday, October 28, 2010

Ai can haz minipulations pleez?

I don't quite remember where I found this because I was hop, skip and jump-ing through the blogosphere. I can't help but marvel at the shamelessness with which this speaker advocates manipulating Amazon reviews of liberal books to be low and conservative books to be high....along with movie reviews that may have political influence.

Rotten to the core is this kind of activity....says Yoda.

A good reminder not to believe everything you read or see on the internets.

6 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I think I have long assumed that many reviews on Amazon were not actually reviews in the true sense, but people trying to capture that large audience with their own views. When I check out historical linguistics books, for example, the reviews seem packed with graduate students giving detailed explanations why Merritt Ruhlen is just wrong, wrong, wrong, without a lot of evidence that they have actually read the book being reviewed, which may have only mild and passing praise to Ruhlen. Similar things happen in trying to game the google results by repeatedly hitting particular sites. The reports I read attributed this mostly to liberals, but I'm sure there's a selection bias from the sites I read. I find it mildly irritating, but no big deal. I have even wondered if it were not a bad use of time that I should be glad people I disagreed with were wasting their energies on.

This, however, seems to creep up to a new level, and I dislike it. Though I suspect that unless they are very clever at posing as a person of independent alignment or on the other side, that it doesn't affect much. Liberals might be grateful that AM is wasting resources this way.

terri said...

I'm sure that liberal shave people who do this too.

I just can't get over the matter-of-fact admittance from this guy...not only that he does it, but that he spends at least 30 minutes every day doing it.....and that everyone else should too.

I used to think that the world was full of relatively normal people with only a few crackpots evenly distributed among various groups.

More and more I am starting to wonder if I over-estimated the general reasonableness of the average person.

;-)

DH said...

I don't know if I want a liberal, or a conservative for that matter, shaving me.....

terri said...

DH....heh...very funny.

;-p

"liberals have"

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Maybe we should all spend 30 minutes a day driving traffic to your site.

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