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If it's a "fake" review for values of fake that don't include dishonesty, you can easily choose not to read it.

This is not that. The big example cited is a bunch of people registering their objection to a light book being written about Soviet Ukraine while there's a war on. This is a real objection that a lot of (silly, annoying) people have. The reason the book was not published is because they thought that this objection would go viral and affect the sales of the book.

That has nothing to with fake or false. That has to do with suppressing financially threatening speech.



> you can easily choose not to read it.

I cannot easily exclude it from the ratings. There's a pretty widespread understanding that star ratings are meant to aggregate the opinions of people who read the book.


> are meant to

Maybe review scores ought to be an aggregate of the opinions of people who read the book, but that's not what they actually are. They're an aggregate of how people feel towards a book (for any reason). Such reviews might even be against the rules and guidelines set out for reviews; reviews ought to follow the rules but that doesn't mean they will.

The utility of review scores derives wholly from how they actually work, not from how they're meant to work. So devalue them accordingly.




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