Reader Jon Gallant recently finished the essay collection compiled and edited by Lawrence Krauss, The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowed Scientists and Scholars speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process.” (Luana and I have a paper in it taken from our Skeptical Inquirer paper on the ideological subversion of biology).
Jon decided to leave a review of the book on its Amazon page (his review is shown below in the Amazon rejection). Yep, his submitted review was rejected. He sent the rejection to me and I reproduce it and his emailed speculations (with permission). I’ve put a red box around the submitted review:
At first I was puzzled, as I don’t follow Amazon reviews and know nothing about the ideology of the site or company. Can you guess why the review was returned with requests for changes? I suspect you’ve guessed correctly, though we can’t be sure. I asked Jon what he thought, and here’s some of his response:
Use of the term “woke” in a less than reverential tone is no doubt classified by Amazon’s editors as “hate speech”. After all, it makes wokies feel unsafe. My hunch is that the dopier Communications majors from the 2010s work as review editors at Amazon. The better-connected ones get into the editorial offices of some Nature publications we have encountered.
In truth, I can see no other explanation. The review was not worshipful enough of wokeness, and in fact made fun of it, even expressing a hope that it would disappear. If you have another explanation, by all means put it in the comments. I had no patience to read Amazon’s “community guidelines” to see if there were other infractions.
I don’t know if Jon will resubmit his review, but I thought that this was both sad and amusing. The other reviews (126 of them) are bimodal (70% five star, 18% one star), and it’s also amusing to look at the negative ones, most of them finding the book guilty of association with the wrong people, or not hard enough on Trump and right-wing assaults on science (not its purpose)
I got one of these also recently. I know I’m supposed to be concise, but can’t help but post my book review here. In my case, Amazon listed several of the possible reasons, none of which (obviously) apply to my review. However, some sensitive key words (including a double-entendre) do appear in my review. Here it is:
The Secret Language of Maps – review
This is not a book about maps or mapmaking. It tries to be a book about info-graphics, but even on that topic, it is very disappointing. I’m not sure why the author wanted to use the maps in the title? The first pages of the book are about re-defining the word “maps” to include all and any graphics at all. How queer is that? It’s like a bait and switch, but to no good purpose. It makes the reader feel deceived.
About half the book is taken up by what amounts to a badly written “young adult” novel, upon which the few of this book’s exemplary “data” graphics are based. Although the book theoretically addresses some of the issues you might confront designing a data/info-graphic, it has practically zero examples of such graphics in actual use. There are no examples of good graphics vs bad graphics. To the extent the book includes graphics, most are to help visualize some of the concepts that are addressed in the text… you know, like the page might include an illustration of a person with a question mark above their head, when the text describes mental confusion. But none of these graphics are relevant to the problem of how to make a good useful graphic. Adding insult to injury, the text is laced with “woke” notions about how your graphics could do harm, and so you should be mindful of things like heteronormativity, social systems of oppression, internalized racist bias, the gender “spectrum,” etc. I found that offensive and argue that’s completely irrelevant (even counterproductive) to the project of how to make an effective (and honest) data graphic.
I’m looking for a good book about maps, and got a bad book about data graphics. I already have some good books about data graphics, all authored by the excellent Edward Tufte (that’s a recommendation, so I can end this review on a positive note)!
Thankfully, I was able to return this “Maps” book to amazon.
Incredibly, the above review was rejected by Amazon. I got the following message:
We couldn’t post your review because it doesn’t meet our guidelines for one or more of these reasons:
Profanity
Harassment
Hate speech
Sexual content
Illegal activity
Private information
Please edit and resubmit your review.
Oh man, those are MAJOR VIOLATIONS! It’s a good thing they didn’t have you arrested, as you would have been in Britain!
Greetings, Retro. Your case made me understand the Amazon editors better. They no doubt hoped to join the racket of “Sensitivity Readers” in the publishing industry, but, due to their literary deficiencies, they had to settle for Amazon. When Amazon drops their services, they will then be found “moderating” for video game companies.
Perhaps your use of the word “queer” triggered Amazon’s “sexual content” censor.
“How queer is that?”
The horror!
Under their community guidelines, the closest I found was in the section on “hate speech”:
“You’re not allowed to express hatred for people based on characteristics like:
Race
Ethnicity
Nationality
Gender
Gender identity
Sexual orientation
Religion
Age
Disability”
There are no restrictions about political viewpoints or cultural identities or whatever “woke” is.
My wife and I have reviewed numerous books on Amazon, and have never had one rejected. I’d love to know why this one was rejected. Is there a way to know what needs to be “fixed.”
I once had an executive tell me over and over to rewrite a memo without giving me any guidance on what was wrong. After a couple of rewrites, I finally told her that I’m tired of picking up a sand grain from the beach, finding out that it doesn’t meet her expectations, and then going back to the beach for a new sand grain.
Hello, Norman. I once got from Amazon an electronic tic-tac-to game for my developmentally disabled son, and the damn thing was defective. I didn’t bother to review it, and had I done so, I might have slipped into hate speech. [Maybe that would have been acceptable, as electronic gadget companies are apparently not a “protected” category.]
Yeah. It’s hard to tell what’s going on. Whether to accept or reject is almost certainly done electronically via an algorithm. It could be as simple as using the word “attack” or it could be a more complex AI algorithm that does the evaluation—probably the latter. If your mean enough to the gadget, you might still be blocked.
Jon, the closest I could find in the community guidelines suggests you submitted “Content written in unsupported languages.” Clarity today is a foreign tongue.
Could convert ” “woke” ” to “Critical Consciousness”.
Because that’s what it is.
Might work.
Or a more fun approach :
Something like “wildly omniscient knowledge epistemology”…
Oh oh oh — how ’bout :
“Weltanschauung omniscia knowledge epitsteme”
Or maybe something less rude.
😆
I have put the part of Jon Gallant’s review that I can see into my review on Amazon UK. I’ve never had a review rejected, let’s see what happens.
I’ve always considered putting “woke” in quotation marks to be a way to recognize that the term is controversial. If anything, using scare quotes is a diplomatic nod to those progressive liberals who think the term is frequently misapplied and/or shouldn’t be used – which is why I usually add them myself.
The other possibility is that the problem isn’t with the word woke, but assault. It shouldn’t be used. Substitute assa * lt or “assau*t,” because otherwise people who’ve been assaulted (which includes LGBTQIA2S+, indigenous, and POC peoples) might be triggered and have dangerous flashbacks or something. Asterisks save lives.
Or maybe w*ke?
Given the rise of the term “un-alived” to circumvent online censorship of the word kill/killed, maybe “un-asleep/un-asleeped” would work.
After consulting Webster, could you rewrite as “the attempt by performative activists to capture STEM in America?.
It would be interesting to post the review on Goodreads (which is owned by Amazon) and see what happens. I have never had a review rejected on either website.
Greetings, Curmudgeon. I Just went through the rigamarole of joining goodreads, and I think I succeeded in posting
the same review that displeased Amazon. We’ll see if it stays.
“Woke” is currently transitioning from an uncriticizable term of religious dogma to an obscure footnote from the early twenty-first century culture wars. If you re-submit the article in a couple of months it will probably be entirely ignored…
I have seen “woke” used as a criticism in my amazon reviews. Not sure why this one would be a problem.
Sentiment analysis in natural language processing computes an overall sentiment score by evaluating the words in a given opinion. Using a few positive tokens or words can offset the influence of negative ones in the analysis.
For example, the review by retroformat above is likely to be flagged as negative sentiment due to the high number of negative tokens.
This is an interesting and plausible theory. But if you’re writing a one-star review, panning a book/product that you don’t like, how could you make the review more balanced? I suppose I could have put in a paragraph about some other books that I like a lot? (I did mention Tufte, trying to end on positive note). I’ve also seen other things panned on Amazon reviews, were every single “token” in the review must have been negative. My theory: the reviews are scanned for key words that are controversial – I included several, like “woke”, “racist”, “gender spectrum”, “heteronormativity”, “bias”, not to mention leading with “queer.”
After I removed those words and re-submitted the review, it was published. It’s like those words are curse words… literally, they curse your prose.
I wrote very offensivetongue-in-cheek Amazon reviews of the bible and quran, including comments on child-killing and rape, and both were published. That was ten years ago though.
It seems to me the review was rejected for labeling people. Had “modern-day” replaced “woke,” Amazon could not have complained. But if, as Sastra observed in comment #7, the problem is the word “assault,” then “attack” might eliminate Amazon’s objections.
Very strange. To try to get some sense for why an innocuous review like this got rejected, how does it compare with the distribution of positive reviews published on Amazon?
Upon reflection, I don’t think we can conclude much about whether the pejorative use of “woke” was what killed the review. It certainly isn’t evidenced that one must say the term in a reverential tone. That is an interpretation not warranted by the evidence.
I suggest the reviewer re-submit the review, and try to use more neutral language. The term “woke” may be tried, but only in an objective sense, like “… reviewing the growing opposition to empirical, evidence-based thought in Academia from the branch of post-modern cultural left that is commonly known as “woke”.
Amazon removed my review of the Bible years ago. I wanted to help potential buyers of holy books to choose between the two major competing titles, the Quran and Bible. I really enjoyed writing it, but I can see why it would be removed.
Luckily it is archived on Jerry’s website just after it was removed by Amazon: see Comment 20 at
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2011/07/18/amazon-reviews-of-the-bible/
That’s an excellent and hilarious review!
Amazon deleted a review about a book that inter alia discusses the current threats to free speech? You couldn’t make it up.
My reviews at Amazon have been rejected. Indeed, I have even been banned by Amazon from writing reviews. My crime? I dared to suggest that Caster Semenya has XY chromosomes.
The folks at Amazon are very ‘woke’. Just ask Abigail Shrier (“Irreversible Damage”) about that. It appears that Jeff Bezos is not. I suggest sending an appeal to Jeff Bezos personally. I don’t have an Email address that actually works. You might be able to get one.
I think the editors are ueber sensitive or are automated. I was suspended twice from Facebook for quoting Josef Goebbels and again for quoting a Bible verse.