Happened to me when I saw a book on the US site, I wasn’t able to see all reviews, but there was a button to sort-of “apply” to get approved for seeing all of them.
It took five days, then I got this email.
Interestingly, they’re not doing this on the European site, you can still see all reviews there.
If you want to try it out yourself: This is the book where it happened. Despite that email I can see all of the reviews again, so maybe it’s a feature they’re testing out.
It’s really shady to have a rating system and hide ratings within that system. Why have it at all then?
Remember Amazon is owned by a billionaire or someone who is a part of the sociopathic class. They only want you to buy they don’t give a shit about what you care about just pressing that buy now button. The laws are supposed to force them to care about the shit we care about but, everyone on this planet in politics is a corporate shill so tough luck.
If you’re talking about Bezos, he only owns 9% (or possibly even less now) of Amazon.
Huh til, it still is the source of his wealth, and the other 91% probably also goes mostly to rich assholes, however I’m sure the public will be holding the bag if Amazon ever goes down in valuation.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052816/top-4-amazon-shareholders-amzn.asp
It sounds like they were taking about whoever owns Amazon.
Oodles of shareholders? I doubt it.
Maybe it’s lazy on my end, but my first guess is that it would be in order to prioritize and normalize the AI summary. Basically a dystopic move towards trust me bro
“To improve the user experience we are hiding things that were one of the primary reasons we became a monopoly.”
To manipulate the market, is the only answer I can come up with. Why else would they do this?
Making their massive collection of reviews only available to their shitty AI, I would suppose.
I tried from canada on amazon US same as you i have to “apply” to get more review a fast search show they do that since at least since middle of 2025 on “ products in categories with high competitive pressure and potentially manipulable reviews “
Still don’t make much senses
So that’s actually interesting though. I’m not necessarily condoning this behavior. But if they have identified that unscrupulous, fraudulent outside parties are potentially manipulating the reviews, and that is what’s causing Amazon to block the reviews, then that might actually be a beneficial move on their part. It’s Amazon, so I’m inclined to think they are the ones behaving badly, but this is at least a possibility.
I’d wager it’s to prevent other AI trainer bots from scraping the reviews
For what it’s worth, I’m in the US Amazon app on Android and it states “96 customer reviews”.
Once I unchecked the box requiring verified purchases, it does in fact show 96 reviews.
Where did you see that system? Because I went to the page and didn’t see anything like that.
there’s no apply button and it seems all reviews are there
Since it’s a content rating review system, I almost wonder if Amazon has internally marked your account as a minor or something like that, so they’re hiding explicit reviews or something.
I just checked and it looked normal on my end as well.
I don’t see it anymore either. Might be they’re testing out this feature and not all users get to see it.
yea i wonder if that’s the case.
There are a few laws regarding fake reviews and review suppression in the states as well. So I’m almost wondering if it was the classic case of they started implementing something and then legal was like, yo, cut that shit out. That’s not allowed.
But I still feel like it might be something to do with the push for removing explicit content from minors that every platform seems to be doing.