<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/08/amazon-algorithm-curat...> [...] Over in Amazon’s oncology category, DiResta found a book with a bestseller label touting juice as an alternative to chemotherapy. For the term “cancer” overall, she noted that The Truth About Cancer, “a hodgepodge of claims about, among other things, government conspiracies”, had 1,684 reviews (96% of them five-star ones) and was given front-page placement. Just out of interest, this week I tried a search in the books section on Amazon.co.uk for “cancer cure”. Of the first 11 available titles that came up, only one looked like a conventional scientific treatment of the topic. The others focused on herbs, oils and “natural cures they don’t want you to know about”. This is not because Amazon has a grudge against scientific medicine, but because there is something about unconventional books in this area that its machine-learning algorithm is detecting – perhaps from reviews posted by evangelists for non-scientific approaches. (DiResta thought that this may indeed be the explanation: Amazon did not confirm this.) But it’s conceivable that in really controversial – and currently topical – areas such as vaccination, coordinated user reviews by anti-vaxxers might successfully game the algorithm. And in the past Amazon has been accused of being “a giant purveyor of medical quackery”. What it really means, I guess, is that, in the online world, information warfare is now ubiquitous. And since books are really just containers for information and ideas, it was predictable that marketplaces such as Amazon would become targets for manipulation. Truth is always the first casualty in war. [...]