roadrunnertwice

From:

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.