Amazon Hides LGBT Books- Page 2

[Plum]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 3:33am

The accusation isn't that all LGBT-themed books were affected, but that nearly all the books being delisted were LGBT-themed. I've pointed out above that the "net" hardly caught everything gay. This isn't an intelligent or well thought-out policy and it never looked that way. And I sincerely hope that on Monday, Amazon will give a better explanation than "it was a glitch" and apologize, because even in the very unlikely event that this was completely unintentional, it sure as hell looked bad, and it affected authors, too.

[papalovesmambo]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 10:36am

it certainly is getting attention. a front page mention on the google news homepage with links to 282 atricles.
behold the power of the rainbow!

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 4:57pm

More evidence Amazon has been slowly hacked over months and months by Religious Right Cyber Pirates.

But Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday.

Too little, too late?
Brutal Honesty

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 5:01pm

A lot of sites are calling BS on that.

[romantico]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 5:13pm

Has Amazon issued an apology?

[Plum]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 5:18pm

At least one Amazon rep has admitted that this wasn't a hack or a glitch.
Feministing

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 5:18pm

First of all, how does the dude know it's gay guys flagging his stuff on Craigslist?

[Plum]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 5:43pm

What now? Are you talking about Weev? He's a notorious troll, a gigantic douchebag, and the hack he claims to have perpetrated didn't happen - someone else took a look at the script, debugged it, tried running it, and pronounced it useless. You can't take a word Weev says seriously; he does it all to provoke.

[morosco]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 5:47pm

Yet another explanation.

It's startingly simple: It doesn't take very many votes at all to get a product flagged as "inappropriate" and booted off the rankings. [Well known troll "Weev"] says he created a script that generated a list of product IDs for every gay and lesbian book on Amazon. From there, he just needed a whole bunch of people to flag the books as inappropriate, which wasn't hard, because simply getting someone to go the URL of a successful flag would count as another one. Using an invisible iframe on popular websites owned by friends and a group of "third-worlders" he hired to register accounts, he generated enough votes to de-list gay and lesbian books en masse.
Hacker Claims He Shoved Amazon Into the Closet

[morosco]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 5:53pm

From Gawker:
Why It Makes Sense That a Hacker's Behind Amazon's Big Gay Outrage

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 5:54pm

Oh how I love brick and mortar real world bookshops I can walk into. If they're homolit specialists, even better!

[Plum]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 5:59pm

Oh, how I wish that academic textbooks weren't a giant scam perpetrated on students, so I could afford to get them at my bricks-and-mortar university bookstore instead of on Amazon.

And again, Weev is a troll. Take everything he says with a truckload of salt.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 6:06pm

The folks at Amazon are freaking out. They have always been idiots.

Yesterday, during the mess of this, they FINALLY ended their insane practice of allowing "customer-based reporting of adult books."

In other words, I could get my church group together--and they could get the church groups of their friends and relatives--and all say that Gone with the Wind was "adult"--and no one coul do anything about it.

They were hacked and it will take them years to recover from this public relations mess.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 6:12pm

From that link, a feminist take on the hackers:
More on #AmazonFAIL: Hackers, misogyny, homophobia and you

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 6:12pm

My church group would be so not interested. Well, it's not a church group in the traditional sense although there is a lot of kneeling.

[Plum]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 6:12pm

They weren't hacked. They were trying out a program of some kind that uses tags to designate which books are "adult" so they can be hidden from searches, and they messed up. They are going to stick by this Wal Mart-esque policy of hiding the naughty items, though with this uproar they're probably going to tweak the tags or the parameters of the filtering so the results aren't so phenomenally stupid.

It would be nice to believe that this was done by Weev, because then we could go on thinking that it isn't the fault of some homophobes programming Amazon's "adult" search filters. But I just don't think that's the case.

Not a Updated On: 4/13/09 at 06:12 PM

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 6:18pm

My most recent link is the Deanna Zandt link from your link, Plum. This is not something new Amazon just tried out. The basis of their website is that all users can post. It's always been prone to hacks, but in the past, the hacks were jealous writers going on the the pages of competitors and posting bad reviews.

But there was ALWAYS the capability of flagging a book as "adult." That's why this was first noticed in February.

[Plum]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 6:22pm

That Deanna Zandt item also points out that people have taken Weev's code apart and found it doesn't work, making his claim pure BS. She then says that she thinks someone else did a similar hack - again, I'm skeptical.

Given the admittedly limited information we have now, I think that they were trying this new filtering system as early as February, and they just gave it a badly judged tweak or update over Easter weekend.

Also, what flagging system? I'm looking at a Wayback screencap of an Amazon product page from last year and I'm not seeing it.

ETA- Now an Amazon insider is saying that in an attempt to enforce the "adult stuff gets hidden" policy, a programmer in France mistranslated the definition of "adult" into something broader while tinkering with some obscure node of the system that's shared across all Amazons. Or something. This is way over my head technologically, but still pointing away from the hack explanation. (Which, again, came from Weev, who is a troll and a tool.)
Idosyncratic Code Updated On: 4/13/09 at 06:22 PM

[CapnHook]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 7:49pm

I got this response after e-mailing Amazon yesterday:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.

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.


Sincerely,

Customer Service Department
Amazon.com

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 8:17pm

"Ham-fisted"?

Isn't the expression "ham-handed"?

Even their apologies are badly handled.

Updated On: 4/13/09 at 08:17 PM

[Plum]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 8:35pm

It's an improvement over "it's a glitch", but that's not saying much. And while it's true that books about feminism, sexuality generally, sex for the disabled, etc. were affected, overwhelmingly, LGBT-themed books were affected while ones with similar heterosexual content weren't.

This is looking like the result of a screw-up by a programmer in Amazon.fr, but it also looks like it might have shed light on the way Amazon labels its books.

[canmark]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 9:24pm

The "ham-fisted" message has been reported in the media. I've seen it on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the LA Times:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/04/amazon-begins-to-rerank-affected-books-theories-swirl.html

A French Connection? A possible explanation from the Seattle P-I article:

Former Amazonian Mike Daisey offers some insight.

"After hearing from people on the inside at Amazon, I am convinced it was in fact, a 'glitch,'" he says on his Web site. "Well, more like user error--some idiot editing code for one of the many international versions of Amazon mixed up the difference between 'adult' and 'erotic' and 'sexuality.' All the sites are tied together, so editing one affected all for blacklisting, and ta-da, you get the situation."

According to Daisey's inside sources, "A guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up 'adult,' which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like 'erotic' and 'sexuality.' That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon."

(I learned of this via The Stranger and Lilith Saintcrow, and have contacted Daisey for more information.)

Daisey has written a book about his experience working at Amazon, titled, "21 Dog Years: A Cube Dweller's Tale."

Amazon has not confirmed to me whether Daisey's synopsis is accurate, but it's the only explanation hanging out there as of 3:30 p.m. on Monday.

Updated On: 4/13/09 at 09:24 PM

[antonijan]

Posted: 4/14/09 at 2:05am

Whether it's a glitch, a hac job or an anomalous software...I demand an apology!

[papalovesmambo]

Posted: 4/14/09 at 1:35pm

and i demand cake!

[Q]

Posted: 4/14/09 at 2:27pm

Christopher Rice's message, as the Board President of the Lambda Literary Foundation:

"Lambda Literary Foundation applauds the diligent work of writers, bloggers and activists in calling attention to this deeply distressing turn of events. I have seen my first novel stripped of its sale ranking by this apparent computer glitch so I join other writers who are baffled to the point of anger. I take great solace in the quick mobilization of our community in response to this apparent marginalization of LGBT books; the grassroots power of the Internet has been placed on glorious display for all to see. Over the next few days, we at Lambda Literary will be monitoring the situation very closely. Amazon is one of our nation's largest general book retailers. In their commitment to creating and sustaining technological advances in the publishing industry, they have laid claim to the future of book distribution. As such, they have a pressing responsibility to create an unfettered exchange of stories and ideas. If a quick and decisive response to this problem is not forthcoming within the next few days, we at Lambda Literary look forward to leading a sustained and impassioned dialogue on this issue, which will seek to harness the energies that have been released by our community's admirable response."