amazonfail

It's the morning after the night before...

Just in case you've been under a rock, Amazon has been removing the sales rankings on a lot of books, with a very heavy skew towards books that have LGBT terms in the keywords regardless of their sexual content, and a skew towards alternative sexuality books of all kinds, and to erotica aimed at women. And a few other things besides, while leaving other things untouched, which together give a rather disturbing picture of pandering to a particular narrow viewpoint of what "adult" consists of. This completely removes those books from view on many of the search functions, and on things like "if you liked this book..."

I think it's not actually that likely that the exact pattern of censorship is an official corporate policy. I think it's much more likely to be one or more of the following possibilities that have been floated during the discussion: some pressure group gaming the automated "report this item as offensive" system; a kneejerk corporate reaction to complaints about "porn" without thinking things through; some mid-level manager showing his/her bigotry in public by imposing personal standards of "adult" on a new filtering system without the knowledge of the higher-ups, etc, etc.

But if that's the case, then Amazon need to think long and hard about how they got gamed, whether externally or internally. And for those who think there's nothing to worry about, because it was only the queers and the feminists and the pornographers who got hit -- what happens when *your* interests get the same treatment?

Because that's the real issue underlying this -- Amazon has just censored a whole lot of books by making it almost impossible to find them in their database. They're a private organisation and they have the right to do that if they want, but it's not something I want to encourage. What will be the next target of this censorship? I believe an opt-in filter with a sane definition of adult would be a good and useful service for them to offer, but this is neither opt-in nor sane.

amazonfail -- Dear Author looks at the metadata

Jane at Dear Author has done some digging into the metadata on the censored/not censored books, and yes, it does look like it's the category data that's being used to filter, and that *anything* with "gay" or "lesbian" in the category metadata is being hit, which is why we're seeing things like the hardback edition of Barrowman's autobiography filtered and the paperback edition left alone.

Next question -- who in Amazon decided that "gay" and "lesbian" are automatically adult content? If this came from the top, that's a problem. If it was somewhere a lot lower down, that's *still* a problem. Whatever it is, it's not a glitch.