PR Stunt: Activists Sink Amazon Bestseller with Fake Reviews

We’ve written a good bit about the use and abuse of fake ‘user reviews’ recently, and we couldn’t help but share this bizarre story of a “crowdsourced” effort to sink a certain Amazon bestseller—all organized and executed by people who hadn’t actually read the book in question.

The reason for this anti-PR stunt is a little unusual. The book, titled “Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It“, is by (almost) all accounts a well-researched tome that traces the history of the AIDS epidemic.