Amazon Hides LGBT Books

This kind of bigotry makes me furious.

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Disgusting.

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"deranks" didn't seem to have quite the same ring to it, papalovesmambo. I'll change it if you really think it's misleading, though.

Expecially infuriating to me is that one of the primary statements concerning the closure of gay bookstores is that our writing is now so available through 'mainstream' souces such as this.

By the way, this is what the search results for 'homosexuality' look like now.

It isn't just fiction being affected - scholarly works like Foucault's writings on sexuality are being delisted, too, leaving only books on how you can keep your kid from being gay. Nice.


Screencap

Updated On: 4/12/09 at 07:29 PM

What are you talking about? I just used the search feature for Maurice and Brokeback Mountain, and both books came up immediately.

nmartin, different books got different treatment. Sometimes only one edition of a book got removed, sometimes it was deranked (look to see if it has a sales ranking) but not removed from the search. The targeting seems to have been through the book tags - almost anything with a gay & lesbian subject tag was suspect to deranking, which is why the results were so arbitrary and bizarre.

If you want an example of a book whose regular listing disappeared from search results, try searching for Heather Has Two Mommies on Amazon and then on Barnes and Noble.

(That's what I mean by "arbitrary", BTW. A children's book gets removed for being too "adult", but Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, with its fairly explicit gay and straight sex scenes, doesn't? Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. 1 is gone, but not the second or third volumes? This was clumsy as well as bigoted.)

Updated On: 4/12/09 at 10:57 PM

This guy thinks it was an Internet troll attack.
On Amazon Failure, Meta-Trolls, and Bantown

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Think: Jose and a Gang of Terrorist Sock Puppets

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Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is there and ranked http://www.amazon.com/Angels-America-Millennium-Approaches-Perestroika/dp/1559362316/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239595330&sr=1-1

But Angels In America, Part One: Millennium Approaches has been unranked http://www.amazon.com/Angels-America-Part-One-Millennium/dp/1559360615/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239595330&sr=1-2

This edition, ranked http://www.amazon.com/Angels-America-Tony-Kushner/dp/1854599828/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239595330&sr=1-3

This edition of part two, unranked http://www.amazon.com/Angels-America-Part-Two-Perestroika/dp/1559360739/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239595330&sr=1-4

I think the Bantown argument has some merit. What those trolls do is take advantage of weaknesses already inherent in the way these big websites do business (I was around for the Strikethrough that author is talking about and it was pretty epic). The weakness in this case, I guess, was Amazon's system of marking off and hiding "objectionable" literature - it was weak because it was too easy to make it target non-objectionable books.

So these trolls set some fundie group on Amazon like attack dogs on a holiday weekend, when it's likely that experienced response staff would be away, and sure enough, Amazon responded stupidly.

I think it's a good theory because LiveJournal has had flareups like Strikethrough two Memorial Day weekends in a row. That's not pure coincidence; that's trolling.

Or, of course, it could just have been someone in middle management in Amazon getting a bee in their bonnet about those awful gays and their nasty gay books. Who knows? It's the holiday weekend thing that makes me think the Bantown idea has merit.

ColortheHours, with respect, the evidence doesn't point that way at all. If it was a software glitch, Amazon wouldn't be sending letters to authors who were objecting to being deranked saying that their books were too "adult". They'd be sending letters saying, "Oops, sorry; our software is wonky."

Updated On: 4/13/09 at 12:06 AM

A Google bomb? Amazon doesn't use Google for its internal search so far as I know, and even if it did, Google bombs don't work that way at all. (In fact, a Google bomb was made in response to this controversy. If you search for the terms amazon rank you'll see.)

Google bombs work like this:

You pick out your target search terms - in this case, 'amazon rank'. Normally, the first Google search results for 'amazon rank' are pages describing Amazon's ranking system.

Then, you pick out what you want the new top search result to be. In this case, the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books website created a page (linked below) with their own, novel definition of what 'amazon rank' means.

Finally, you advertise the bomb and ask people to spread it. People all over the web read the Smart Bitches page, went back to their own blogs, and created links to the target page with the title 'amazon rank'. They did so repeatedly, and asked others to do the same, and in the space of a few hours the top Google result for 'amazon rank' became the Smart Bitches page. I've contributed a tiny bit to the bomb with my link below.

It works by taking advantage of how Google's search indexing works. And it has nothing to do with what happened to Amazon's search results, which was an inside job. Google bombs can't make tens (if not hundreds) of LGBT-related titles disappear from Amazon's search engine; they just don't work that way.

I'm not saying I'll boycott Amazon (yet), or that I think this is an expression of deliberate company-wide policy. But I need better proof that it wasn't than the BS "software glitch" excuse. I'm leaning against the Bantown theory now that people are dissecting the mechanics of it, and my instinct is still that this was middle-management idiocy combined with poor customer relations, but Amazon needs to show that they give a crap and understand that this is bad.



Amazon rank

Updated On: 4/13/09 at 02:51 AM