SubscribeAlso, try doing some research next time. The three titles listed all come up in search results and have sales rank:None of those searches show the in-print book version.
Brokeback Mountain
The Well of Loneliness
Tipping the Velvet
FAIL
If the original product requirements were not robust (e.g. they didn't fully specify what adult meant), the whole development process was hamstrung.Having extensively mucked around in the data exposed by their affiliate program APIs, I would not be shocked to discover that a rolled-out-too-quickly bulk tool missed some stuff and also pulled far too many innocuous titles into the net. Their internal data is really, really, REALLY messy. There's not really any way to avoid it when you cover as much ground as they do.
Also, the Joy of Gay Sex has been scrubbed in the All Departments search, yet is still available for Kindle (as someone else pointed out above, on preview). I'm trying to figure out why it makes sense to scrub the hardcopy from their search while leaving the Kindle version. Kids can't own a Kindle or something?Kindle projects are stored in a completely different product tree. That's one of the reasons that the "Someone botched a large-scale bulk change and cleanup was low priority until people started complaining" explanation feels like the most plausible one to me.
Still, that's all it could take in a situation like this. A bad piece of code + a database that's been cobbled together over 14 years = FAIL.Indeed. That doesn't diminish the seriousness of the issue, and it certainly highlights the Google-like power Amazon has to make or break long tail books that are unlikely to show up at the local Borders. But the "Why didn't Kindle books get de-listed" and "Why is it just the US" stuff is not proof of a conspiracy; kindle vs. print and US vs. Canada are existing database boundaries that are outlined in their developer documentation.
CNET News: Amazon criticized for de-ranking 'adult' books.
Seattle Post Intelligencer: Amazon under fire for perceived anti-gay policy.
Examiner.com: Amazon.com has anti-gay "technical glitch".
Advocate.com: Amazon De-ranks Books with Gay Content.
The Consumerist: Gay and Lesbian Books Lose Amazon Sales Rank For Some Reason.
We considered all of these, Mr. Sidhedevil and I. I don't see how any of these could produce these incredibly focused results.And the answer is, "The results are NOT focused." Amazon's database is a giant assy tangle of keywords and outdated hierarchies that shift around and maintain ugly, broken backlinks for compatibility reasons when they try to do much of anything. It works, but it's big and broken at any given moment. It's wikipedia-esque.
And the answer is, "The results are NOT focused."By which I mean, the results we are seeing are classic "didn't filter a search set carefully enough" results. This is the result of a stupidly broad action, with the boundary lines appearing at obvious technical breakwalls like Print vs. Kindle and US vs. Canada.
All the anti-gay books (Recovering from Homosexuality and the like), which all have "gay" tags, still show up, though. I'm not seeing how buggy code could discriminate between Heather Has Two Mommies and Recovering from Homosexuality.Product grouping and categorization on one of the axis that isn't displayed to the public or directly submitted by visitors to the site. One of the ugly and annoying parts of Amazon's system is that they have a staggering number of mechanisms for grouping, organizing, and associating products. At any given moment, some of them are broken. Some can span multiple product groups (say, books and audio books, or 'video' and 'dvd') while others are blind to products with different ABIS_* typecodes. Others mechanisms great but only for up to 50 items at a time. Or they don't work in Japan, etc. Some of them are visible browsing the site, others are only visible when you poke around with specific focused requests in their APIs. Internally, I'm sure there are even more ways to slice and dice.
Oh, please. You find it easier to believe that broken code or infrastructure managed to mangically touch everything gay, except the anti-gay religious stuff, the gay adult stuff, but magically avoided the straight porn because it's your considered opinion that magically homophobic bugs in code are more likely that deliberately homophobic action?I am not suggesting "magical homophobic bugs." My considered opinion is, "Amazon product grouping mechanisms are complex and messy, and it is easy to imagine reasonable scenarios in which this intersection of products could have been flagged without malicious intent. Thus, let's wait for a moment and see if it goes back to normal."
So after the massive outcry forces Amazon to reverse this cute little queer-positivity filter, I'm still going to have questions for Amazon. Like, what criteria do they use to decide what counts as "adult"? Do they filter other books too? What option will they provide for those of us don't want our Amazon searches and browsing filtered?All excellent questions. And up to this point, commentators seem to be assuming "homophobia" is the selection criteria. This is a bit silly and is likely to obscure the farther-reaching questions you raise.
To whom it may concern:
It has recently come to my attention that Amazon has effectively de-listed a very large number of books with gay, lesbian, transgendered and bisexual content. As much as I have enjoyed doing business with Amazon in the past, I cannot condone this action and so must boycott Amazon until such time as the problem is resolved.
I request that Amazon do the following:
1) Undo the de-listings and restore the sales rankings of the affected books.
2) Issue a formal and public apology.
3) Explain precisely how the de-listing came about.
4) Explain the measures Amazon will take to ensure that something like this can never happen again.
Thank you very much for your attention. I look forward to your prompt and appropriate response.
Sincerely,1. If this is a new glitch, why did Craig Seymour report his book was de-ranked in February?If this is a new glitch, why did I see my PHP technical book de-ranked in March?
2. If de-rankings are a technical glitch, why was your customer service rep citing policy?Because first-line support drones answering email have a limited palette of canned responses. By definition, those canned responses exist before problems arise, and only after problems arise are the lists updated. All we know about that canned response is that "Adult content policy" was the closest match, and as a number of people speculated at the time, it didn't even seem appropriate for the question that was asked. Like many canned emails that I receive from first-line support. They are not the place to get accurate information about what happened inside a large organization to cause a FUBAR. Not with your local cable company, not with AOL, not with Cisco, not with Amazon.
offering nothing but "it's a glitch" sounds a little bit too much like they're counting on general American computer illiteracy to get them out of a tight spot.General American computer illiteracy has already gotten a lot of people angry about it, so I don't see how it would be much of a change.
Most of their content seems machine-driven.This is absolutely the case based on everyone I've talked to who's worked at Amazon. It's a strength and it's a weakness. They can roll out new forms of product association and categorization algorithmically rather than by employing an army of people with label machines, for example. And they can field gajillions of incoming support requests without having lots of human beings reading each and every "My book didn't get here on time" email.
I guess they're just going to undo the symptoms without ever publicly speaking to the problem?Alternate scenario: A number of programmers who have been taking espresso shots and No-Doz since noon yesterday trying to clean up the data without causing OTHER ripple effects (like, say, causing Mapplethorpe books to appear in a search for 'Christ') and the effects of their cleanup work are slowly becoming visible. Elsewhere in Seattle, a harried gaggle of corporate communications folks scramble around in a related but very different-looking panic trying to decide how to do damage control.
So the consensus is that the person claiming responsibility is telling the truth? Isn't he exposing himself to some serious liability by publicly admitting that he did this?No idea. I'm not jumping to conclusions about what he's claiming, but his story is 100% plausible and matches up with the odd outlier data, like smaller sets of GLBT lit getting delisted in the past.
Also, if you're familiar with Weev, he's kind of famous for "confessing" to shit he hasn't done on b_h.Oh, ugh. As if this wasn't complex and messy enough already. Thanks for the heads-up. Excellent point about the feminist and disabilities oriented stuff.
I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites ... They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLsThis claim is verifiable, at least by Amazon, so it'd be possible to check his story.
Since when does Amazon have a button to report inappropriate books or products?If they do I haven't seen it. But that's part of the problem with Amazon's system: there are roughly thirty or forty ways to submit data about a product, and they appear and disappear as different approaches are tested and refined.
No, hippybear. If someone had posted that same text in a forum like /b/, the shouts and clamors of "TROLL!" would make the windows rattle. Post it in LJ, and people are falling over themselves praising the evil genius.I got what appeared to be new information and passed it on here, in the context of this thread, without doing additional investigation. I was ambivalent, gave myself wiggle room, but said that it was interesting if true. Fifteen minutes later, folks in this thread essentially debunked it.
See, this is why accident and outrage are not mutually exclusive.I agree. I just think that outrage becomes pointless screaming unless it's paired with accuracy. If you make claims that are untrue based on snap assumptions, people stop listening to your outraged rants.
Glad you got my MeFi Mail.We're all part of a long chain of crazy information transmission. The more heated it gets the more difficult it is. Is there any way that we can pair the rapid "breaking news" that everyone wants with the carefully vetted accuracy that they also want? I don't know.
After hearing from people on the inside at Amazon, I am convinced it was in fact, a "glitch."Again, if this is in fact correct, it's going to be an awesome case study in the interconnected dangers of large-scale automated data management, skeleton-crew PR, and 'Taking vacation days, ever.'
Well, more like user error--some idiot editing code for one of the many international versions of Amazon mixed up the difference between "adult" and "erotic" and "sexuality". All the sites are tied together, so editing one affected all for blacklisting, and ta-da, you get the situation.
The CS rep who responded that this was Amazon policy was just confused about what they were talking about, and gave standard boilerplate about porn.
The dumbest part is saying it was a "glitch". A "glitch"? Just say that it was one of your workers making an editing error. Really dumb PR move, that one.
Of these, the Firefox shitstorm, Nipplegate, and Strikethrough stand out. Friends, #amazonfail is simply more of the same. I don't mean to imply that any of the same people are involved, but rather that the same tactic is involved, and it is working devilishly. Cleverly as well, this troll was perpetrated on a weekend AND a holiday, when Amazon's customer service would be operating on a skeleton crew and most of those who would be able to fix the problem would be at home and possibly unavailable or on vacation. Also, like Nipplegate and Strikethrough, this troll pits a marginalized and activist community against a big company, with the Internet and all its various discussion media (in this case, blogs and Twitter) as the facilitator.
The problem with the whole "all the sites are tied together" thing is that while we were all seeing problems on amazon.COM, lots of people were checking both amazon.CA and amazon.CO.UK and not seeing the same de-ranking problem.Those sites share a similar codebase but have different (overlapping) pools of product information. Affiliate codes, for example, are region-keyed, and ASINs for one region are not necessarily the same product in another region. The underlying system, though, is the same basic codebase.
That's the way the filter works here. It's not a "censorship" filter; it's an "embarrassment" filter.Also, it's important to note that this is not a filter based on Amazon saying, "Wow, people will be embarrassed if we let them see naughty things."
I asked Mike for more details, and according to his inside sources, the story is that a programmer at Amazon France was editing the site to filter porn out of some search results, and he "mixed up 'adult,' which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like 'erotic' and 'sexuality.' The system he was working on is universal, so the change he made propagated across Amazon's sites worldwide.Still seems like it's missing a detail or two, but this continues to corroborate the "it's a technical mistake" line of thought.
The Fail at this point is in the stunning lack of communication.Absolutely.
“Amazon.com said on Monday that a ‘ham-fisted cataloging error’ caused thousands of gay-themed books to be classified as ‘adult’ literature and de-ranked from its online store, the Seattle Times reports. ‘This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection,’ Drew Herdener, communications director at Amazon, told the Times.
‘It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles -- in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica.
‘This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing books from Amazon's main product search.’”
Even after it explained the scope of the problem, Amazon continued to face criticism for its slow and limited response to the online blowup, particularly at a time when sites like Twitter can so easily accelerate and amplify a public outcry.Nice story in the New York Times about this mess: manages to cover the trollish false confession, seems to get the facts right, has some bits of reporting not seen elsewhere. And at least they tried to talk to some publishers (who didn't comment).
Add in the idea that somehow 1 guy in France, working on Easter weekend, magically affected rankings back in February, and it still smells like a disgruntled insider to me, not a glitch.1) Amazon has a policy of preventing "adult content" of particular types -- driven by complaints from their own customers -- from appearing in search results or "You might also be interested in" displays. This has the unfortunate side effect of causing certain titles to effectively vanish from Amazon unless you're very very deliberate when hunting for them.
And I don't feel that you can fault the mob for seeing what appeared to be a very specific discriminatory effect on the Amazon store and, after hearing nothing more substantial or satisfying than "it's a glitch and we're working on it", deciding that there was something sinister in the offing.My main complaint is not with people who were outraged, but with people who -- while confessing their own ignorance of anything related to Amazon's infrastructure -- made authoritative statements about what was and wasn't "possible." People who, in numerous blog posts, discussions, forums, and online feeds said quite confidently that "Gay stuff is being filtered out. Filters work like [x], not like [y], so this had to be intentional."
I think, for myself, it is about the shock that a company such as Amazon has a mechanism in place which can, with the "stroke of a pen", conduct editing to their database which amounts to targeted censoring.Indeed. And that's where I think a lot of the 'geek vs. nongeek' disconnect came from. Folks who are used to working with large database systems are used to the fact that the tools needed to maintain stuff are the same tools needed to censor, or memory-hole compromising data. There's not really any way to separate those things from each other; hammers can kill people, and all that.
“Dabble.com founder and ‘veteran Silicon Valley technologist’ Mary Hodder offers the most rational explanation I've heard to date for what happened with regard to gay and lesbian book sales de-rankings on Amazon, in a post at TechCrunch. She expands on a report that a French employee was behind the ‘ham-fisted,’ as Amazon called it, mistake:The issue with #AmazonFail isn’t that a French Employee pressed the wrong button or could affect the system by changing ‘false’ to ‘true’ in filtering certain ‘adult’ classified items, it’s that Amazon’s system has assumptions such as: sexual orientation is part of ‘adult’. And ‘gay’ is part of ‘adult.’ In other words, #AmazonFail is about the subconscious assumptions of people built into algorithms and classification that contain discriminatory ideas. When other employees use the system, whether they themselves agree with the underlying assumptions of the algorithms and classification system, or even realize the system has these point’s of view built in, they can put those assumptions into force, as the Amazon France Employee apparently did according to Amazon.I would suspect that subconscious discriminatory assumptions are built into plenty of algorithms as similarly as they're built into the human mind.”
This of course doesn’t explain how the problem arose two months ago, and why when Amazon was notified, they didn’t look into it then. I would suggest that the same underlying assumptions that drove their classification and algorithm system to be built to filter ‘gay’ into ‘adult’ also led their investigations in February and March to lead to nothing. It was only public outrage this past weekend that caused them to look harder, beyond their own assumptions, to find the underlying problem.
Could you say on MeFi that it's not so much that the group is increasingly angry, because that sort of sounds like the romance community itself is anti-GLBT, which is not at all the case--if anything, it's more a frustration that the meme of the fail doesn't quite reflect the reality... we're hearing about X, when the actual issue was X + Y, which could change the narrative both about what happened and how to prevent it in the future.So that's where the romance/erotica community is on all this.
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posted by TochterAusElysium at 1:57 PM on April 12