My impression is that they didn’t know what was going on until Sunday night and they haven’t had much chance to either investigate it or to prepare the comprehensive statement.
Hyperbole without a good reason tends to devalue good words like “horrify”.
Goddamnit, you made me agree with Starving Artist about something. Now I have to shower.
I was inclined to believe the “We’re all being trolled” theory, but if it’s true that there’s a live human in the process between receiving the complaint and pulling the page rank, then I don’t know what to make of this.
It’s Monday morning. How long do you think it’ll be before we get an actual, non-scripted, non-generic statement from Amazon?
Really? You’re asking God to damn something over a little hyperbole? Ask God to damn disease, ask God to damn a murderer, ask God to damn America, I’ll understand. But you’re really reaching if you’re asking for God to damn something just because of a little misunderstanding on a messageboard. I’d go so far as to say you’re devaluing the word. Right now I’d put its value at $43.97, six cents less than before you trivialized goddamnit.
And don’t even get me started on your having to shower.
As for the outrage over the first link under “homosexuality” being an anti-gay book, I’m not upset by that. Although it’s no longer true, it use to be true that when you Googled “Jew”, the first link would be an antisemitic site called “Jew Watch.” It was a byproduct of how the algorithm worked: among other things, folks talking friendlylike about Jews tend to use other words (Judaism, Jewish people, even Jews) more than they used the word Jew.
I suspect something similar is going on here. This thread is all about homosexuality and Amazon’s weirdness thereto. But if you search the thread for the word “homosexuality,” the only time it shows up is in relation to this one weird search result: otherwise, folks are using words like queer, gay, and LGBT. I suspect that the word “homosexuality” is used much more often by homophobes than by queer-friendly sorts, explaining why a homophobic book would be the first result when searching for homosexuality.
How the hell do you define a “gay” book? Were they just bumping off material labeled by its publisher as LGBT-related, or any book with gay characters, or what?
I mean, Steven Fry’s books always have a gay protagonist, but I wouldn’t call them LGBT fiction. Iain Banks novels sometimes have characters who have variously been lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered during their lives…
Maybe (although in my experience, “homosexuality” is way more common and non-pejorative than “homosexual”). But when I do a search for “homosexuality” at chapters.com, only one of the books on the front page is anti-gay. None of the top 20 or so search items at borders.com is obviously anti-gay. For the top item at amazon.com to be anti-gay (not just anti-gay, but promoting ex-gay movements) – as well as at least three of the other search results on the first page – relative to these other booksellers indicates something’s badly askew.
And it stands to reason, because as has been pointed out, this has had the effect of suppressing or even completely eliminating the de-ranked books from common searches. When I search for “dancer from the dance,” the current edition is nowhere in the search results; I have to click on a used edition and go through the author’s name before I can find it, and it took me the better part of an afternoon to figure that out.
So, yeah. Having LGBT books eliminated altogether en bloc from search results in by far the world’s largest online retailer is incredibly worrisome to me.
It could be as simple as someone applied a rule based on taxonomy, expecting it to remove “adult” content and not realizing that the Amazon taxonomy put Gay-themed books under Adult. Or they have a multi-noded taxonomy and it had unintended consequences.
These systems are rule and taxonomy driven, no one looks at individual titles except in extremely rare events. The systems are complex and it’s fairly easy to make rules changes without fully understanding the ramifications.
What I like about you, matt, is that you provide incredibly persuasive evidence for your posts. So yeah, consider my earlier speculation retracted: it looks like this isn’t a peculiarity of the language, but is rather a result of their bizarre delisting thing.
Roger Ebert complained about the rating given to a movie about two young gay males. I wish I could remember the name but it was certainly from within the last 10 years or so. The movie didn’t have enough foul language, sexual content, or nudity to be rated R but it was given that rating because it was about two gay males.
Supposedly Steve Jackson Games stopped doing RPGA events because TSR got their panties in a bunch over SJG’s adventure. It featured the standard rescue your true love adventure except this time the true love was a male and so was the rescuer. About as much sex and romance as you’ll find in most other role playing games but the gay element was too much.
I can certainly understand this type of thing happening with Amazon 10-15 years ago. I think it’s a bit odd to happen in 2009. It just strikes me as being so silly. I wonder if Ammonite by Nicola Griffith is “adult?”
Odesio
I don’t think the facts of the case are in dispute, that Amazon.com had some craziness this weekend. What I dispute is the narrative behind it, that Amazon as an entity decided to do this on the quiet, got busted by heroic Twitterers, and are now denying it and lying about it. I would believe it in a heartbeat if it was Walmart, but I need better evidence to believe it of Amazon. The Occam’s razor explanation of a bunch of fundies gaming the system or a disgruntled homophobic database manager simply seem way more likely. But the story for me has become something else and something more disturbing – SNS give people the power to make a lot of noise in a short amount of time, and since the noise becomes news, it makes them feel validated for having been in on a mob. I don’t care much about Amazon, but I’m wondering what overnight witch hunts we will see in the near future. Our outrage meters are set to “very sensitive”; our wait and see setting is shut off.
Really? Who are they worried about offending? The fundie elements who make up the bulk of gay haters already think TSR is evil for promoting devil worship and such.
This looks more like passive homophobia on the part of Amazon than active. Still, with the speed of non-news these days, if something negative about my company were all over the internet, I’d want to know and respond quickly. Perhaps Amazon corporate doesn’t have email. The fact that they didn’t respond suggests that it’s low priority and / or they aren’t on top of it. Neither is a surprise. Neither makes me happy, of course, but it’s too early to show up at the warehouse with pitchforks. I did order some books from ABE.com instead. Frankly I’m a little more worried about discrimination from the government and the general public than on the part of one specific book distributor.
I wonder if it’s part of a broader plot to discourage reading and thinking on the part of the trolling organization’s sympathizers.
There was a time when Dungeons and Dragons got rid of all there references to devils and demons for PR reasons and they didn’t make a return until the 3rd edition. I suppose it could be related to that. Also, and I hate to say it, but those who play D&D or other role playing games aren’t really any more enlightened than the general population nor are they any more intelligent. At least in my experience.
Odesio
One hell of a good point.
We like fast, snappy media in this culture - and that means we like fast, snappy decisions and pronouncements. Get the opinion out there and strike while the iron is hot.
I’m not sure it delivers a “mob” frisson, though, because the mob is not right there at your elbows. What it does give, though, is an instant, cheap high of empowerment.
“Wait and see” not only doesn’t deliver the buzz - the medium and the pace of information exchange itself is unsuited to it.
There is an upside to that, and that is you don’t have to wait very long. But an alarming story will always have more energy than its calmative antidote.
*A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. *
- Mark Twain
The guy at this link (warning: definite troll, not necessarily honest, not necessarily SFW) claims to be behind the issues at Amazon, claims it to be a relatively simple hack of their system: http://community.livejournal.com/brutal_honesty/3168992.html
Certainly not when it comes to gender issues. Sure, it’s OK for a male roleplayer to play a “sexy” female drow wearing less than I floss my teeth with, but if that same male tried to play a normal, gay, human, you should see the fur fly.
This right here is why I’m not getting my panties all bunchy over this at the moment. It seems pretty plausible that there could well be some form of loophole in Amazon’s system that lets outside parties tinker with the rankings. It just seems more likely than stealth ninja corporate homophobia on the part of a gigantic corporation not known for their conservative politics. If this is the case, and I’m Amazon, I probably don’t want to discuss the matter publically until I can figure out what the fuck is going on. Admitting there’s such a loophole may placate the outraged, but it encourages the goddamn trolls. Which leads to more outraged people, etc.
Given that all this blew up over the course of a holiday weekend - yanno, when people aren’t in the office (and, frankly, often not even at home) and that it’s now not even noon EST (and barely normal business hours PST where Amazon’s corporate HQ is) I’m not all that dismayed that they haven’t had much in the way to say about it. It’s gotta take a certain amount of time for their tech people to figure out what the hell happened and arrive at a fix (or at least a patch to keep it from happening while they institute a real fix). Until then, I’d think “avoiding feeding the goddamn trolls” is going to be the corporate strategy.
Frankly, in my personal opinion, this is more of an “Oh well shit” moment than an “OMG It’s an emergency! Cancel vacation time immediately! Call everyone in for OT!” moment for Amazon. I’m just thinking that “some asshole is screwing with our rankings to aggravate the LGBT community” doesn’t engender the same sort of corporate urgency as “someone hacked the checkout system” might.
They still sell vibraots and lube though, right?
Phew. You’ve got to throw something in your cart with that erotic classic Heather Has Two Mommies.
I looked up that book just now, and amazon has a preview on the site. As the author begins to propose the kernel of his thesis on why little boys grow up queer, he gives this argument on page 24:
OH GOD WHAT IS THAT THING HANGING OFF MY PELVIS? Whatever it is it’s making me want to suck cock.
(I will hereafter refer to this alien, mysterious object as my UFO – Unidentified Fucking Object. Meanwhile, off to be a man-whore!)