Amazon.com's Epic Fail

Published April 13, 2009 @ 05:44AM PT

amazon.com

It takes a major, major mistake to create all sorts of news over Easter weekend. Exhibit #1: Amazon.com, and their collossal botch of deleting the sales rank of gay and lesbian books, labeling them as "adult" content and removing them from search rankings.

Amazon.com, meet Stonewall 2.0. LGBT rights bloggers - led by Mark Probst - managed to make this the story of the weekend, even surpassing the news that Barack Obama got a dog.

Thousands of LGBT rights supporters have emailed Amazon.com to ask why they suddenly removed the sales rankings from such harmless LGBT books as Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, and a number of other PG-rated books. In a public relations email tantamount to nothing more than corporate spin, an Amazon.com official explained the removal of nearly all things LGBT with the following statement:

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.

Wow. Someone buy Amazon.com a dictionary, and ask them to look up the words "adult" and "erotica." Because the books they're banning are about as far away from "erotica" as a John Grisham novel.

Amazon.com is now saying that the whole removal of LGBT books was a big flub, and that they're working on remedying the problem. That explanation is just not good enough for America's largest online retailer. Especially when books that talk about how to cure and prevent homosexuality are still allowed to climb up the best sellers list.

We've created an action over here at change.org that allows you to email your thoughts directly to Amazon.com's CEO, Jeff Bezos. Please, tell Amazon.com to stop discriminating against LGBT books, and ask them to make public the set of guidelines for how books are classified on the site. Because right now, it appears that a homophobe with an axe to grind is running the filtering system over there.

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Comments (8)

Yep, it is 'all over the place.' Lets keep up the effort, and heat.

Posted by Lee Dorsey on 04/13/2009 @ 07:35AM PT
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Amazon.com has done a mistake in which they have unfortunately done something homophobic. By removing books that are of LGBT content, Amazon.com has succumbed to intolerance which is an unacceptable business model. In addition, their explanation above is nonsense which was written to hide their intolerance. No business must succumb to intolerance against the LGBT community. Finally, Amazon.com's action is unjustifiable.

Posted by Edwin Bonilla on 04/13/2009 @ 11:21AM PT
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Michael, FYI, there seems to be evidence that Amazon.com has been the victim of a massive prank. Per Consumerist.com:

An online miscreant named Weev is taking credit for this weekend's fiasco where reams of GLBT books were removed from Amazon sales ranking, sparking a massive online riot. Weev, pictured, says he organized an army of off-shore computer users to make a bunch of fake Amazon accounts and flag all the gay and lesbian books they could as inappropriate. Also, he got several friends with high-trafficked websites to embed an iframe code that made their visitors automatically send the flags without their knowledge. If true, this recent post by a formerly profligate troller provides insight. However, no one can verify Wee's claims as Amazon appears to have deactivated all the ways he used to ply his prank. It's hard to trust a professional liar like Weev, even the idea's plausibility doesn't speak well for Amazon.

Posted by Emily Gertz on 04/13/2009 @ 02:51PM PT
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Whoops, the link:
http://consumerist.com/5210378/amazon-gay-book-removal-was-massive-prank-i-did-it-claims-troll

Posted by Emily Gertz on 04/13/2009 @ 02:51PM PT
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Yeah, I wouldn't be shocked if a hacker is behind this. Still, the weird nature of the PR person's response - "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists." - seems eerily scripted.

Again, I wouldn't be surprised if a prankster is behind this. But that's all the more reason for Amazon.com to make public how they classify their material. It would be that much easier in the future to determine if Amazon is just being pranked, or if there's something seriously duplicitious about Amazon.com's ranking system.

Thanks for the link!

Posted by Michael Jones on 04/13/2009 @ 03:19PM PT
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Move on people. They fixed it. Amazon is not evil.

Posted by Jared Peters on 04/13/2009 @ 05:26PM PT
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Jared,

I'm not sure if you are a part of the LGBT community or if you are a supporter of LGBT rights or not, but if you are then you would understand the way the LGBT community is treated in general society. It would not be surprising if it had not been a prank.

You are right, Amazon is not evil, but without the letters and the pressure, Amazon may have never caught the problem.

It is good to know that they have corrected the problem, but the LGBT community has been bashed by businesses (metaphorically speaking of course) on multiple fronts, and much of that had to do with pressure from religious groups. Thankfully many of those businesses didn't fold to the reich-wing American Taliban. Some of those that didn't fold to the pressure would include: Disney, Ford, Subaru, Jeep, and Pepsi. There are many others, but when we see these businesses fold to the American Taliban it is up to us to help these businesses fight against these religious groups.

Posted by Dave Hershey on 04/13/2009 @ 06:33PM PT
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The final truth seems to be that it was, indeed, an Amazon.com internal error, but not limited to LGBT titles/materials:

"This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

"It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.
"Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.
"Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon."

Via, again, Consumerist.

Posted by Emily Gertz on 04/14/2009 @ 08:19AM PT
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Author

Michael is the Communications Director for the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, and previously was Communications Director for Pax Christi USA, a progressive Catholic human rights organization.