WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT AMAZON
Apr. 15th, 2009 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogOkay.
If you’ve been following the #AmazonFail train wreck, you know by now that Amazon’s official explanation is human error (i.e. some employee in France filled in a tagging field wrong). You also know that a lot of people aren’t buying that line. And then there’s this Weev character claiming he did the whole thing just to make the Internet mad (and to show that Amazon’s inappropriate content flagging system can be abused).
Some tech-heads have supposedly debunked his methods, but the one most widely quoted as saying the hack didn’t work has clarified his remarks, saying that he doubts Weev himself did the attack but that it would in fact work. That said, I’ve just spent some time on Amazon (in the erotica section, even) and I can’t find anything that allows you to flag an actual book as “inappropriate”. It only seems to work for user-generated content like customer reviews.
So ... who to believe?
Personally, I think the evidence so far indicates that whether the cause was external or internal, it probably WAS some kind of catalogue problem. As I said before, I found it extremely difficult to believe that Amazon just arbitrarily decided to stop promoting LGBT books. So on the matter of active LGBT bias, I consider the matter closed.
HOWEVER ...
There’s still the matter of Amazon’s initial response to Mark Probst about their “adult” classification policy. And the “error” as described here indicates that Amazon does in fact have such a policy in place. And that is a much larger issue, because if that is in fact the case, Amazon has yet to explain why it’s there, or how it works, or what would qualify as “adult”.
That’s an important question because as we’ve seen, “adult” content gets deranked from the sales charts and left off search results – which in itself seems like a pointless exercise because you have to be over 18 to buy anything from Amazon in the first place, making its customers “adult” by default.
Assuming the point is to ensure decent God-fearing Christians don’t accidentally have their eyes burned out or their souls damned in perpetuity by getting Tom Of Finland books in their search results, why not let users create profiles that filter undesirable results rather than filtering them wholesale from everyone’s search results or sales rankings?
How do you even decide when a book crosses the line? Customer feedback isn’t reliable because any activist group can go to PetitionOnline and generate 50,000 “angry” signatories from offended customers. And in any case, how is “adult” different from “erotica” or a medical book on sexual well-being, or Violet Blue’s Ultimate Guide To Fellatio? How is erotica different from porn?
In fact, how is it different from books that happen to have lots of sex in them? Should Philip Jose Farmer’s Flesh, Laurell K Hamilton’s Merry Gentry series and John Norman’s Gor series be in the same category as Zane and Xaviera Hollander just because there’s lotsa f***ing in them? Conversely, should Cecilia Tan’s Circlet Press line be in the SF section? And where the hell should we file Ron Jeremy’s autobiography?
You see what I’m saying.
Here’s a related tidbit: while the “adult” policy isn’t aimed solely at LGBT books, the fact that so many LGBT books were affected indicates that Amazon tends to classify them under “erotica” or “sexuality”. I can’t say if that’s because the vast majority of LGBT books are intended to be erotica to begin with (which I doubt) or the perception that any book in which sexual orientation of any flavor is a marketing point counts as being about sexuality, even if it’s actually a detective novel. A separate category for LGBT books is understandable – after all, there’s an audience for such books, and they want to be able to find them easily. But the practice of automatically making it a subset of “sexuality” – and thus potentially subject to restrictions – is worthy of public debate.
That said, I don’t think the debate should focus on just LGBT books. The much bigger issue is whether Amazon has, or ought to have (or needs to have) a policy that discriminates against certain categories of books based on their sexual content, be it gay, straight, bi, asexual or whatever.
But then I hope to make a living writing bisexual sci-fi porn, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Anyway, the Def Amazon Boycott is hereby rescinded. But the #AmazonFail tag still applies.
Business as usual,
This is dF
If you’ve been following the #AmazonFail train wreck, you know by now that Amazon’s official explanation is human error (i.e. some employee in France filled in a tagging field wrong). You also know that a lot of people aren’t buying that line. And then there’s this Weev character claiming he did the whole thing just to make the Internet mad (and to show that Amazon’s inappropriate content flagging system can be abused).
Some tech-heads have supposedly debunked his methods, but the one most widely quoted as saying the hack didn’t work has clarified his remarks, saying that he doubts Weev himself did the attack but that it would in fact work. That said, I’ve just spent some time on Amazon (in the erotica section, even) and I can’t find anything that allows you to flag an actual book as “inappropriate”. It only seems to work for user-generated content like customer reviews.
So ... who to believe?
Personally, I think the evidence so far indicates that whether the cause was external or internal, it probably WAS some kind of catalogue problem. As I said before, I found it extremely difficult to believe that Amazon just arbitrarily decided to stop promoting LGBT books. So on the matter of active LGBT bias, I consider the matter closed.
HOWEVER ...
There’s still the matter of Amazon’s initial response to Mark Probst about their “adult” classification policy. And the “error” as described here indicates that Amazon does in fact have such a policy in place. And that is a much larger issue, because if that is in fact the case, Amazon has yet to explain why it’s there, or how it works, or what would qualify as “adult”.
That’s an important question because as we’ve seen, “adult” content gets deranked from the sales charts and left off search results – which in itself seems like a pointless exercise because you have to be over 18 to buy anything from Amazon in the first place, making its customers “adult” by default.
Assuming the point is to ensure decent God-fearing Christians don’t accidentally have their eyes burned out or their souls damned in perpetuity by getting Tom Of Finland books in their search results, why not let users create profiles that filter undesirable results rather than filtering them wholesale from everyone’s search results or sales rankings?
How do you even decide when a book crosses the line? Customer feedback isn’t reliable because any activist group can go to PetitionOnline and generate 50,000 “angry” signatories from offended customers. And in any case, how is “adult” different from “erotica” or a medical book on sexual well-being, or Violet Blue’s Ultimate Guide To Fellatio? How is erotica different from porn?
In fact, how is it different from books that happen to have lots of sex in them? Should Philip Jose Farmer’s Flesh, Laurell K Hamilton’s Merry Gentry series and John Norman’s Gor series be in the same category as Zane and Xaviera Hollander just because there’s lotsa f***ing in them? Conversely, should Cecilia Tan’s Circlet Press line be in the SF section? And where the hell should we file Ron Jeremy’s autobiography?
You see what I’m saying.
Here’s a related tidbit: while the “adult” policy isn’t aimed solely at LGBT books, the fact that so many LGBT books were affected indicates that Amazon tends to classify them under “erotica” or “sexuality”. I can’t say if that’s because the vast majority of LGBT books are intended to be erotica to begin with (which I doubt) or the perception that any book in which sexual orientation of any flavor is a marketing point counts as being about sexuality, even if it’s actually a detective novel. A separate category for LGBT books is understandable – after all, there’s an audience for such books, and they want to be able to find them easily. But the practice of automatically making it a subset of “sexuality” – and thus potentially subject to restrictions – is worthy of public debate.
That said, I don’t think the debate should focus on just LGBT books. The much bigger issue is whether Amazon has, or ought to have (or needs to have) a policy that discriminates against certain categories of books based on their sexual content, be it gay, straight, bi, asexual or whatever.
But then I hope to make a living writing bisexual sci-fi porn, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Anyway, the Def Amazon Boycott is hereby rescinded. But the #AmazonFail tag still applies.
Business as usual,
This is dF
