Amazon blames ‘gay discrimination’ on glitch; blogger says he pulled a scam
By John Lister
Amazon says its removal from sales charts of books by gay and lesbian authors was a blunder rather than a policy decision. Meanwhile a blogger claims he got the books removed through an automated complaints process.
As we reported yesterday, books classified as adult disappeared from the Amazon.com sales rankings. They were still available, but no longer appeared in bestseller charts and became much less likely to appear in search results.
The issue also appeared to affect not only books with homosexual themes (whether or not they were explicit), but even books which were written by gay or lesbian writers, even if their sexuality played no role in the book.
Amazon initially told one author that the removal of the ‘adult’ books was an intentional policy decision, but later called it a glitch. The firm later issued a statement saying “This is an embarrassing and hamfisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.”
It pointed out that books in several categories had been affected by the glitch, not just those of a gay or lesbian theme.
There’s some debate about whether this was a genuine mistake or an intentional decision which Amazon has quickly realized was not going to fly. Either way, the issue remains that Amazon’s system appears to class ‘gay and lesbian’ books as automatically adult, regardless of their content.
A blogger using the pen name ‘brutal honesty’ claims he caused the delistings, apparently thanks to a grudge against homosexual posters on Craigslist. He claims he found a way to get an automated list of gay-themed books on the site, then persuaded friends who owned busy websites to put hidden code on their sites so that visitors unwittingly ‘clicked’ on a link to report the titles as inappropriate. The logic of his story is that Amazon had so many complaints it pulled the titles from sales rankings until it could investigate.
Naturally there are plenty of people taking issue with the claim. But frankly that debate is simply about whether the guy concerned is an honest loser or a dishonest one.
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April 14th, 2009
At first I thought there was no way that tie could be a glitch and that the must have done it on purpose. But now after reading the explaination of the supposed mastermind behind the whole thing, it does sound plausible. But it is strange that one author got word that of was intentional.