“DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK !! This book is based on pure lies. The Sandy Hook Elementary did not have a school shooting, this was a Hoax that was used to create laws under false pretense !! Instead of buying this book, research the video called “We need to talk about Sandy Hook” And here’s the best part… It’s FREE to watch the video. These people are profiting off of LIES, and they are erasing truth from history. This is Fraud, Treason, And Tyranny.”
That’s an Amazon.com customer review — one of many — ruthlessly bashing the mother of a Sandy Hook victim who wrote a book about her healing process. Her book’s Amazon page has been flooded with similarly vicious reviews, which apparently are a concerted effort by a group of conspiracy nuts who claim the Sandy Hook massacre was a government hoax staged to create an excuse for confiscating guns.
Welcome to Rightwing Nuttopia.
The Seattle Times, which occasionally does some good journalism, broke this story as part of their reportage about Amazon customer reviews being hijacked by people with agendas. The newspaper criticized Amazon’s policy of letting anyone post product reviews, not just customers who’ve bought the product. You can read their article here.
The Seattle Times noted,
“Reviewers have long used Amazon as a platform to vent about products that failed to live up to their expectations. Some have even used it to attack authors whose views differ from their own. Increasingly, though, people are launching coordinated campaigns to push political and social agendas through negative reviews often only tangentially related to the product for sale. They are able to do so because Amazon welcomes reviews regardless of whether the writer has actually purchased the product.”
Many people celebrate the openness of the internet, but it has a downside: When anyone can say anything, you get garbage. Before the internet, professional editors acted as gatekeepers for what the rest of us read in books, newspapers, and magazines, heard on our radios, and watched on our TV sets.
Smart people recognize the difference between censorship and editorship; the job of an editor is not to suppress information, but to make sure the information reaching us is true, accurate, and intelligibly presented. It’s not fair to say that newspapers, magazines, and broadcasts are censored; they’re edited, which is a vastly different thing.
The internet is neither censored nor edited, and that can be a problem. Remember GIGO, one of the early computer age acronyms? It stands for “garbage in, garbage out,” meaning the information you get out of a computer is no better than the inputs. That applies to the unedited garbage that freely flows in — and out — of the internet, too.
When reading Amazon reviews, or anything else on the internet, you have to be your own editor. The internet is an amazing, wonderful, world-changing means of getting easy access to information. You just have to know what’s valuable information, and what’s garbage, because no one is figuring that out for you.