Amazon LBGT book blacklisting weirdness

[MetaSexual2]

It appears that Amazon has begun blacklisting - removing them from search and rankings - LBGT titles. There is some speculation that someone (a troll or activist group) is gaming their automated adult classification system to do this though. Hopefully the story will become more clear today.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/04/amazon-deranks-gayfriendly-books-the-twitterverse-notices.html
http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6651080.html

[MetaSexual2]

Update on this... a script kiddie/troll is now claiming responsibility for the Amazon gay book blacklisting:

http://community.livejournal.com/brutal_honesty/3168992.html
http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/13/amazon-gay-outrage-weev-technology-internet-amazon.html

Amazon is still saying it was just a glitch and will be corrected.

[softfruit]

I'd been reading it elsewhere but thanks for posting this here :)

I figure if anything like the troll's claim is true, Amazon are unlikely to say so (it would just draw more attention to a weakness in their system and encourage more people to deliberately try and play similar tricks against whatever their pet hate material was).

So we probably have a couple of weeks ahead of us in which we all wait and see how Amazon deals with the issue, and what happens to book rankings, in which time we'll get a better idea whether this is a corporate policy issue and whether the backlash from LGBT readers and resellers is enough of a threat for them to change things. And then either give a big sigh of relief, or start making purple and rainbow :flag4: "not buying from amazon" banners for our blogs...

[12voltman59]

I do hope that this situation is simply that a hacker got in and "punked" them-I would hate to think they would go and make a decision to de-list "gay" material. This does make sense that the "being hacked" scenario is what has happened.

[cand86]

Unfortunately, it's not a glitch or trolls or hackers, or at least, they're saying it's not and that it was all them (both possibilities are equally depressing):

http://www.feministing.com/archives/014797.html

[MetaSexual2]

So my general impression so far is that this wasn't exactly either a glitch or an outright attempt at censorship, but it is disconcerting. What I think Amazon is up to is experimenting with finding a way of maximising their revenue by making as many people as possible happy with their classification system. Of course this purely democratic approach means that the mob rules, and minorities could wind up getting screwed... so its good the LGBT community is a vocal one. Human oversight of complex databases is a black art, but it is something that Amazon *should* be very good at.

[allbimyself]

I don't care if it was intentional, a glitch or a hack. Amazon screwed the pooch. Not that it matters as anyone that shops Amazon is a tool and throwing their money away.