Amazon Flag Reviews

September 7, 2021

Amazon Flag Reviews

Playing with the Data

Below are some sketches and loose explorations based upon research into reviews for political flags on Amazon.

Sentence Similarity

Building off of a sketch by Dan Shiffman, I explored the different patterns that arise from these larger datasets (full of fake reviews). https://editor.p5js.org/bethfileti/sketches/DNqOl2oxI What is interesting here is that fake reviews would have a similar sentiment, but so could real reviews. If there is a really outstanding quality about an item, it does make sense for multiple reviewers to echo this idea. In these visuals, each sentence is being compared with itself (across the top and down the side). If the sentiment is similar, the box is colored blue. If the sentence is different, the box is red. The diagonal line down the center is when each sentence is compared with itself.

Re-Writing the Pledge of Allegiance

Using sentiment matching with the reviews of different flags on Amazon, I rewrote the pledge of allegiance. To get the full effect of these, stand up, put your hand over your heart and recite them with the same cadence that you would recite the traditional pledge.

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The Data Scraping

I spent so many stupid hours from 11/13/21 – 11/16/21 manually scraping reviews for these products. I need to learn how to do this programmatically.

Search Term: “trump flag”: https://www.amazon.com/Kithwaro-President-Grommets-Patriotic-Decoration/dp/B0828S9WFM/ref=sr_1_26?keywords=trump+flag&qid=1636770736&sr=8-26

Some reviews are actually for stickers/bumper stickers
Used to be a set of 4 flags
High recurrence of dates? 10/5, 11/24, 9/23, 7/2, 10/30
Reviewers with 2 names… highly suspected as fake: https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AE7QGLWJRMOERECJQW7XK465YRSA/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8

Search Term: “biden flag”: Yielded pro-trump results

Search Term: “biden flag for democrats”: https://www.amazon.com/Joe-Biden-Flag-President-Democrats/dp/B088DQC37Q/ref=sr_1_3?crid=33XR13IK8M229&keywords=biden+flag+for+democrats&qid=1636811719&sprefix=biden+flag%2Caps%2C171&sr=8-3

Some reviews were marked as Early Reviewer Program
At some point item was listed as windsock with the “color” as “biden” rather than “JOE”. One image of windsock to show different product.

Search Term: “Black Lives Matter flag”: https://www.amazon.com/Anley-Breeze-Black-Lives-Matter/product-reviews/B08BLJVMG1/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews