#amazonfail - full story so far

[Whisperelmwood]

More Info:

Amazon.com has decided to take books with "adult content" out of their site's ranking and/or search engine. In other words, you can't view how some works such as "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx, E.M. Forster, and Alex Beecroft's False Colours (which to my understanding has no adult content and is not erotica) are ranking on Amazon's site. Other books have been removed completely from the site's search engine (this includes the aforementioned False Colours). You can still Google these titles and their Amazon pages will come up, but if you try to search for them on Amazon's site, some of them won't.

So, what do these books all have in common? They contain GLBT content. Are they all graphic? No. Books such as The Advocate College Guide for GLBT Students - which is, as the title suggests, a guide for college-bound GLBTs - have been completely removed from the site's ranking system as well (it still comes up in a search, fortunately, but you just can't see how well it sells). Are any heterosexual erotica being removed from Amazon's search engine and ranking system? You'd think that the answer is "yes", but it's a big resounding NO. It seems that Amazon is essentially censoring GLBT books on their site.

Ironically, yaoi and BL has not been removed from either the search or rankings. Who knows how long this may last, though.

From creatingmyth's journal

A chronological round up of articles and journals blogging about it.

List of books so far censored.

Mark Probst's LJ entry in which he asks an Amazon sales rep about what's going on and gets a response.

Craig Seymour's blog entry on how this has been going on since February.

Petition against this obvious discrimination towards GLBT literature.




NEW INFO:

Amazon now claims that there is no new policy and that what happened was the result of a glitch. Bullshit.

If it was a glitch, I'd like to know how it affected ONLY the LGBT lit.

 

[Pulsar]

Re: Amazon.com VS LGBT Lit - full story so far

Here's something you should try: go to Amazon's main page, do a search on 'homosexuality' and look at the top results... now those are offensive books!

 

[Whisperelmwood]

Re: Amazon.com VS LGBT Lit - full story so far

Here's something you should try: go to Amazon's main page, do a search on 'homosexuality' and look at the top results... now those are offensive books!

*does so*

Geez... A list of books on how to HEAL homosexuality? Ugh.

 

[Whisperelmwood]

tehdely

On Amazon Failure, Meta-Trolls, and Bantown
Some UPDATES:

* weev has come forward and claimed responsibility for #amazonfail, in a manner similar to what I describe below. I can not attest as to whether or not his claim is factual. [info]bryant rebuts.
* Amazon now claims this is a glitch. Only second-hand information seems to be available; there is no official posting from Amazon at this time
* It is worthwhile to note that during strikethrough, not everybody at Six Apart was naive to the reality of what was going on. I feel like I implied otherwise below. What I can say is that Six Apart learned a lot from that episode about managing PR and relations with your user community; lessons that I'm sure Amazon is learning very fast right now.

Onwards with the post:

Disclaimer: Please note that this is just a theory, and take it as such.

*ahem*

Relevant links first:

* Shitstorm on Twitter
* List of censored books on Amazon

Basically, #amazonfail is the name for a brewing Internet shitstorm that started some time on Easter Sunday regarding Amazon.com's sudden decision to blacklist any books with LGBT(QQI) content from appearing in best-seller lists or search results. The blacklist also apparently extends to books with feminist themes, books about dealing with rape, etc. Initial complaints to Amazon resulted in the following stock response, which just angered people more:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

"GAY CONTENT IS ADULT??!! RAPE SURVIVOR CONTENT IS ADULT?!!?? HOW DARE YOU AMAZON RARARGH INTERNET RAGE!" responded the masses, freely pointing out the continuing availability of straight porn and sex toys in Amazon search results (or dog-fighting books or trashy romance novels or Mein Kampf or anything else that would be found "objectionable" by any reasonable standards). Clearly a double standard was at play.

Now, let's just put ourselves in Amazon's shoes. Keep in mind that Amazon is a smug, fairly liberal company headquartered in fucking Seattle of all places and, last I checked, Jeff Bezos is not exactly a Christian fundamentalist. Why on earth would they suddenly censor only a specific group of content that deals with a marginalized and politically active community? Why would this policy change not take the form of a specific policy, but rather of very discriminately flagging only certain titles as "adult" content? Why would this happen over a weekend?

It's obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as "adult" after too many people have complained about it. It's also obvious that there aren't too many people using this feature, as indicated by the easy availability (and search ranking) of pornography and sex toys and other seemingly "objectionable" materials, otherwise almost all of those items would have been flagged by this point. So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find. To the outside world, this looks like deliberate censorship on the part of Amazon, since Amazon operates the web application in question. To me, this looks like one of two things:

1. Some "Family"-type organization astroturfing Amazon in an attempt to rid the world of EVIL PRO-HOMOSEXUAL FILTH!!
2. Bantown

A theory starts to emerge. Now let me backtrack for a bit, and talk about a similar event that happened to my own company, Six Apart, back in 2007, called Strikethrough. Here's how Strikethrough worked:

* Somebody enlists Warriors for Innocence, a "To Catch a Predator"-like organization (but significantly more fundie and batshit) in the battle against "pedophile" content on LiveJournal
* Warriors for Innocence brings down holy Jihad on Six Apart, consisting not only of complaining directly to 6a, but also threatening to involve the media, as well as directly threatening companies like Google, which advertised on LiveJournal, to pull their ads, lest they be viewed as supporters of pedophilia
* Six Apart, faced with a sudden and unexpected and multipronged attack, reacts rashly, and in an unannounced and unexplained policy change bans thousands of accounts from LiveJournal for listing certain sensitive keywords in their profiles, without the chance for appeal, and hopes that WFI will leave them alone
* The ban ends up targeting mostly fiction writers, and is so sweeping that it includes communities for discussing famous works of literature, rape and incest survivor communities, and more. The collateral damage is massive
* Butthurt users rise up en masse and create a shitstorm the likes of which Six Apart hadn't seen since the "Boob Nazi" debacle
* With its tail between its legs, Six Apart backpedals. Not too long afterward, LiveJournal is sold to SUP, who quickly roll back many of the more objectionable policy changes

That, my friends, is pure Bantown. What is Bantown? Some things Bantown is not:

* A trolling organization
* A group of people (at least since 2007)
* An IRC channel

Bantown is a tactic for inciting meta-lulz on multiple levels through the alignment of third-parties against each other. Bantown is like the plot of most James Bond movies, wherein some nefarious evildoer brings the US and the Soviets close to war. Bantown is a trolling technique of the highest order, which usually pits communities against each other, or communities against companies, or organizations against companies, or companies against organizations... Lest I sound too starry-eyed, let me list a few successful Bantown trolls:

* Nipplegate
* Toorcon Firefox shitstorm. Here, google it.
* LOLJ. Here, google it.
* Strikethrough

Of these, the Firefox shitstorm, Nipplegate, and Strikethrough stand out. Friends, #amazonfail is simply more of the same. I don't mean to imply that any of the same people are involved, but rather that the same tactic is involved, and it is working devilishly. Cleverly as well, this troll was perpetrated on a weekend AND a holiday, when Amazon's customer service would be operating on a skeleton crew and most of those who would be able to fix the problem would be at home and possibly unavailable or on vacation. Also, like Nipplegate and Strikethrough, this troll pits a marginalized and activist community against a big company, with the Internet and all its various discussion media (in this case, blogs and Twitter) as the facilitator.

Amazon will spend weeks cleaning up this PR mess. Trust will be destroyed for many, and may not ever be repaired for some. People have already mentioned canceling orders and canceling accounts, and by this time the controversy has found its way to MSM blogs and newspapers. Expect the fallout to last a while, and when you scratch your head at why Amazon would allow such a thing to happen, remember "I told you so".

This whole event also brings to mind an ongoing debate I've had about the merits of trolling, which I define in its simplest form as "exploiting and demonstrating the weaknesses of online trust relationships". In this case, it is Amazon's trust relationship with its users, upon whom they rely to flag objectionable content. Whether or not exposing vulnerabilities in trust systems is, in itself, a net positive is a whole other debate, similar to the debate over "full disclosure" in the Internet security world. I'd like to bow out of this debate entirely, though you're encouraged to discuss it in the comments if you'd like

The author is a former non-member of a non-IRC channel called Bantown which no longer exists, never existed, and will never exist again. He also worked at Six Apart during Strikethrough and complained loudly to his superiors, to no avail, that they were being trolled. The author now enjoys the simpler things in life, keeps his trolling to the comment sections of local blogs and newspapers, and is by and large a better and happier person as a result. The author has no relation to any of the Epic Trolls enumerated above except for perhaps not knowing some of the non-entities involved in not perpetrating them.

For all links, go to original post: http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html

Neil Gaiman.

Yesterday morning someone called @Zanzando twittered me, saying,

@neilhimself Neil, if you could tweet re: Amazon removing GLBTQ titles from searches & rankings (# amazonfail), that'd be great. Thanks!

I asked for links, expecting it not to be a real problem, and found myself discovering that, yes, Amazon were indeed doing this -- deleting books from the Amazon Rank database. And to books like Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. It was a very real problem. (A list of affected books is up at http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html) (The removal of a book's Amazon rank is, among other things, going to make it much harder to find on an Amazon search.) So I twittered about it, using the #amazonfail tag, and people read it and retweeted it and spread it around. And it rapidly became the top topic on Twitter. (Er, I'm not saying this was because of me. I probably speeded things up by a few minutes.)

Soon wonderful things like this were appearing, and I was retweeting them. People within and without the GLBT communities saw the utter stupidity of this (along with the dangers of a more or less monopolistic retailer that was used as much for information as it was for sales deciding that only information it approved of could go out there).

Several hours later people were asking me about why I wasn't boycotting Amazon because Amazon hadn't fixed it yet, and I found myself pointing out that it was Easter Sunday, and honestly, you were going to have to give them a chance to fix it...

(I mean, a week ago, a search for "Girl Scout Cookie" on Amazon.com produced sexy costumes, speculums, wolf urine and a Morgan Freeman biography as a result. Now the speculums and Morgan Freeman biography have vanished (although the wolf urine is still there). Obviously, Amazon listings are always in flux...)

Having said that, Amazon describing it to the AP as "a glitch" isn't as reassuring as they might perhaps have hoped. Something's obviously wrong, and it's something that Amazon should not ever have touched with a ten-foot bargepole. But who made it happen, and whether it was stupid or evil, and how long it's going to take to fix, and whether they're going to apologise, all remain to be seen. (NB. If you're an Amazon spokesentity and you're reading this, trust me, the whole apology thing would be a really smart idea.)

Here's a piece on why it may not be fixed overnight http://sbisson.livejournal.com/927640.html


Edit to add, and here's Patrick Nielsen Hayden as well: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011173.html
...

For all links go to original post: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/04/amazonfail-sunday.html

 

[Whisperelmwood]

Amazon's very bad day
Posted by Patrick at 08:46 AM * 172 comments

I went away for an afternoon of band practice (1), and when I got back, my Twitter stream had exploded over the matter now hashtagged as "#amazonfail". Briefly, if you were also out: It appears that, fairly recently, Amazon removed a large number of books from its sales rankings, which means they no longer show up as results in searches for anything other than their specific titles or authors. The books thus affected have been primarily (although not entirely) works with significant GLBT content; as a result, as thousands of people have now pointed out, Heather Has Two Mommies and The Well of Loneliness are now categorized as "adult", removed from Amazon's sales rankings, and thus invisible to subject-based search,but The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, American Psycho, and Mein Kampf are ranked normally and visible to all kinds of search. Compounding matters, queries to Amazon have been met with boilerplate customer-service-style answers professing an Amazon policy, hitherto not widely known, of deliberately unranking material deemed to be "adult." As LJer "tehdely" (2) summarized what followed:

"GAY CONTENT IS ADULT??!! RAPE SURVIVOR CONTENT IS ADULT?!!?? HOW DARE YOU AMAZON RARARGH INTERNET RAGE!" responded the masses.

Some people have wondered if this reveals a culture of homophobia at Amazon, or whether the timing has something to do with the recent legalizations of same-sex marriage in Iowa and Vermont. My own guess would be that it has nothing to do with homophobia and everything to do with the fragility of large organizations. I'd bet lunch that the sequence of events, in its simplest form, went something like this:

(1) Sometime in the middle-distance past,maybe a couple of months ago, maybe a year, it doesn't matter,somebody decided that it would be a good idea to make sure that works of straight-out pornography (or, for that matter, sex toys) didn't inadvertently show up as the top result for innocuous search queries. (The many ways that this could happen are left as an exercise for Making Light's commentariat.) A policy was promulgated that "adult" items would be removed from the sales rankings and thus rendered invisible to general search.

(2) Sometime more recently, an entirely different group of people were given the task of deciding what things for sale on Amazon should be tagged "adult," but in the journey from one department to another, and from one level of the hierarchy to another, the directive mutated from "let's discreetly unrank the really raunchy stuff" to "we'd better be careful to put an 'adult' tag on anything that could imaginably offend anyone." Indeed, as Teresa pointed out, it's entirely possible that someone used a canned list of "adult" titles supplied from outside, something analogous to the lists of URLs sold by "net nanny" outfits, which would account for the newly-unranked status of works like Lady Chatterley's Lover. (As one net commenter observed, "What is this, 1928?")

If you don't think this kind of clusterfark is entirely possible, you probably haven't worked in a large organization. I don't mean any of this as special pleading on Amazon's behalf (although, full disclosure, obviously they're one of Tor's largest customers, so you may dismiss my views if you so desire). I just find it implausible that Amazon would want to alienate GLBT readers and their friends, who form an enormous and valuable segment of both their customer base and (surely) their own organization. Indeed, I suspect that dozens of Amazon executives and PR professionals will be having hurried meetings in Seattle this Monday morning, and that consumption of antacids at those meetings will be at an all-time high.

None of which means that anyone shouldn't be mad at Amazon, or that Amazon shouldn't be embarrassed. Rather, it means that this is how the world works. A great deal of racism, homophobia, etc., happens not because anyone particularly wants to be racist or homophobic, but because the ground has been tilted that way by arrangements made long ago and if you're not constantly on the lookout it's easiest to roll downhill.

,-
(1) By the way, if you were planning to see us at Banjo Jim's this Friday,and do so, it's a nice venue!,please note that the time I'd previously announced as 7 PM is in fact 9 PM.

(2) Note that tehdely has a theory of what actually happened which is different from my own but (to my mind) also plausible. Their whole post on the subject is worth reading.

UPDATE: From Simon Bisson, some well-informed observations about how this may be "an artifact of architecture and development practices."

UPDATE: Commenter Bryant (see comment #73) debunks an LJ post claiming credit for gaming Amazon, and goes on to make some very sensible remarks about Twitter, heuristics, and reputation.

For all links go to original post: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011173.html