Don't ever do that marginalization thing

[roadrunnertwice]

Wait, should I do a follow-up post on that #AmazonFail thing? You all heard about the kinda-sorta resolution from everyone else already, right? Yeah.

So I dunno. I'm surely not in a boycottin' mood; the magnitude of the thing and the associated certainty of its discovery makes me pretty sure that there was no coherent and unified plan behind it.

But the fact that it was obviously some sort of cock-up doesn't mean that it wasn't a suspicious or potentially revealing cock-up. For one thing, we now know that Amazon has a stealthily implemented search-censoring system in place, and that it was already in the habit of playing nanny with no openness or disclosure. This seems like an important thing to know. And the fact that whoever had their finger on the trigger was inclined in the first place to hold gay material to a higher standard of "adult"-ness than straight material is both worrying and unsurprising. In other words, the situation was a fuckup, but the existence of the conditions that enabled the fuckup still implies a certain amount of moral failure. If you get me.

So I'm not in a boycottin' mood, but I'm also disinclined to go on about poor li'l Amazon getting piled-on. They can take their lumps, clean up their act, and we'll all move forward from there.

Comments

[pantswarrior]

See, I'm still not convinced. The mere fact that somehow the "Heather Has Two Mommies" book got labelled as "adult" and deranked means that it was no accident that gay content was getting labelled as "adult material". I mean, how do you accidentally apply either "adult" or "erotic" or anything easily misconstrued to mean something along those lines... to a CHILDREN'S BOOK?

Not to mention the emails months ago from Amazon reps saying that it was part of a new policy. And then months later when people discover it, it was a glitch?

So yeah. Their explanation doesn't hold water to me.

[roadrunnertwice]

So, I'm more just riffing here than I am arguing with you; I go back and forth on how much malice I think was involved in this. But I'm not really picturing Amazon acting as an integrated and coherent entity, here: however much malice there was and however high it went, there were right hands involved that did not know what the left hands were doing.

I mean, what's interesting about Heather Has Two Mommies is that it's hardcore famous for the number of queer rights battles in school library systems it's been at the center of. No one who knew anything about selling books would de-list that sucker even if they really wanted to. The context of it being both completely innocuous and a locus of insane-o controversy means that one, someone will always notice immediately if you mess with Heather, and two, INSTANT QUEER AND ALLY RAGE EVERYWHERE. Anyone who knew books well enough to rise to a position of making implementation decisions about search discrimination would know to never involve Heather in a de-listing/de-shelving campaign, because it is the Land War In Asia of censorship fights. Someone did something they totally weren't supposed to do.

Uh, none of that lets anyone off the hook. It's entirely possible that this was a Raskolnikov-style "my only crime was getting caught" situation. My current belief is that there was never any official policy — or even a rough consensus within Amazon — that everything gay should get de-ranked. But the existence of the de-ranking tool is evil, the opacity of the search censoring is evil, and the fact that the people who make these mistakes (or "mistakes") always seem to target some already marginalized segment of society is evil.

---

I have no IDEA what to say about those emails they sent. Those were just surreal and creepy.

[pantswarrior]

Yeah, and I'm not actually particularly angry about it like a lot of people that I know, so I don't mind seeing some differing opinions. And yeah, it's entirely possible this was some kind of lone wolf thing. It's just that their official explanation (last I heard, "oh, it was a guy on our tech team in France, he mistook 'adult' for 'erotica' and flipped the switch on anything labelled 'adult', oops") doesn't hold any water whatsoever based on a kids' book being in there. So basically, it still looks like they're covering something up.

The emails are more dubious, because I know from experience that if you're a customer support peon, you are not always informed of what's going on. It's entirely possible that at the time the thing was made widely public last weekend, the person who sent the infamous "new policy" email thought it was a new policy, because such a policy does make some kind of sense, and they had no idea what in particular this "new policy" was actually affecting. So the recent one doesn't really strike me as deliberately misleading. Even the one back in February might not have been deliberately misleading on the CS rep's part. But it does indicate that this wasn't sudden catastrophe, which Amazon continues to cast it as.

I guess I care more about finding out what actually happened than about just reversing it and putting it to rest. Call it my inner Phoenix Wright. ;)

[kiplet.livejournal.com]

we now know that Amazon has a stealthily implemented search-censoring system in place, and that it was already in the habit of playing nanny with no openness or disclosure.

That fact alone is worth pause. That they've been mighty squirrelly about this system in their apology is also worth pause.

They need to openly admit this; they need an opt-out (better, it ought to be opt-in); they need to reveal the basics of how things are nannied off search results if not go into specific details.

Without taking those steps, searching Amazon will always be a suspect endeavor. It's not so much about boycotting them as their being much less useful than you'd've thought.

[roadrunnertwice]

Entirely agreed.

[livefrommombasa.livejournal.com]

So here's the question. Since you live in Portland, why would you ever buy your books at Amazon instead of Powell's?

[roadrunnertwice]

Well, I wouldn't and don't—Amazon's for kitchen tools and mp3s and the occasional used CD. But they're also an invaluable search and reference utility, especially with the Search Inside This Book feature, and they're one of the only booksellers thinking seriously about the future of text with things like the Kindle. Even if I don't buy my tomes from 'em, the fact that they would do something like this still impacts me hugely.