The fact that anyone was actually outraged in the first place is the real failure here. I would have assumed prior to this past Sunday that nobody would be stupid enough to think that Amazon would maliciously, openly, and unapologetically de-list all material pertaining to homosexuality (or categorize it as "adult").
Okay, fine, Amazon screwed up and there was a glitch or a security hole or whatever it really was. Their bad, they should fix that and people have a right to be upset that their books lost sales or whatever was the case. But moral outrage? Protest logos? Petitions? People either need to lighten up or get lives that lack the required free time to get that worked up over a conspiracy that was obviously irrational.
I would have assumed prior to this past Sunday that nobody would be stupid enough to think that Amazon would maliciously, openly, and unapologetically de-list all material pertaining to homosexuality (or categorize it as "adult").
I'm not going to say that you're wrong. You're not wrong: That was a crazy conclusion for people to come to, because it is something that Amazon would never do.
But I am going to take a wild guess: are you significantly older than thirty? I'm guessing the answer is no.
Those of us who came of age before the Internet were raised in a world where it was intuitively obvious that GLBT literature would be openly, unapologetically classed as "adult" and kept hidden away from the general public. That's the way the world worked.
It's easy to retrain the front of the brain. It's a lot harder to retrain the instincts that you learned as a kid. Especially if those instincts were forged under stress. And gay people and their friends, especially those over a certain age, are intuitively aware that it is (or, at least, was) entirely possible for big, public entities to wake up one day and decide to screw LGBT people over. That used to be the norm.
I sincerely hope that we reach the state where open maliciousness towards gay people becomes unthinkably weird, but it's going to take at least a few more years.
I haven't seen solid enough evidence to convince me that this wasn't the result of an action by an Amazon employee for whom it was 'intuitively obvious that GLBT literature would be openly, unapologetically classed as "adult" and kept hidden away from the general public'. It would seem pretty easy for them to classify this as a 'glitch'. Without complete transparency you can only really judge an organisation by it's actions.
"There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom." -- Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, a 1951 book which I find to be extremely relevant in the era of so-called "smart mobs".
Well, they already do have an "adult" toggle that makes the book intangible and invisible. Given that, it's a lot easier to believe their prudishness extends to what they classify as adult. If they were going to make a moral stand, they ought to have made it at "we won't vanish books".
Can anyone tell me how people like Clay Shirky are using Twitter?
I read Twitter by occasionally surfing to the website and scrolling through the backlog of Tweets from the fairly small list of people that I follow. Which is to say: I'm probably some sort of neanderthal. In this mode, hashtags are kind of useless.
But apparently the cutting-edge users of Twitter spend their days plugged into a client which lets them do nifty tricks like following hashtags in real time. I tried that last month, using TweetGrid. It was hypnotic, and kind of fun, but way too much volume. And it featured spam and trolls. Finally, I understood why some people complain about Twitter spam! It would appear that anyone can create a random Twitter account under a fake name and start spewing arbitrarily-hashtagged crap!
So I lost interest. But apparently many people have not. Do other folks just inhale all the hashtagged stuff, spam and trolls and Amazon-hating hysteria-inducing agents provocateurs and all? Or do serious Twitter users just follow so many people that they actually find the hashtags useful, just to sort through the Tweets from people they are following? Is there some nifty client software, which everyone but me knows about, that does something different from either of these strategies?
I'm relatively new to Twitter but I think the answer is "no". The interface really does suck. Imho, Twitter has very good uses that many people like and suggests many more potential uses that would be powerful except the platform itself is a piece of crap. Twitter is powerful because of its users, nothing else -- MIT's zephyr has supported all of Twitter's use cases and more (and better) for ~20 years now.
If it's easy to understand, people with little imagination have an easy time understanding it and heralding it as revolutionary. It's not.
Following a hashtag in realtime is only useful if it's something with somewhat low volume and on a topic that spammers wouldn't bother with. For example the #pycon hashtag was quite useful during the PyCon conference. Most of the time however hashtags are useful to easily identify what a tweet from someone you already follow is about, and can be handy I think when you need to skim through a decent number of tweets.
This is the second major twitter witch-hunt in the last couple weeks that turned out to be targeting the wrong person. I wish people would wait for the facts before bringing out the pitchforks. I guess that's the downside in a medium of communication as instant and viral as twitter.
I'm surprised by the number of comments here that say "Amazon would never do that". Look at our society, we have a black president openly advocating separate but equal treatment of gay people which to me is mind blowing. We have states voting to make it illegal for gay couples to adopt children, because they are so much better off without a stable family, right? We have once progressive states like CA taking steps back. The simple fact is the majority of people don't see gays as equals. It would not be unheard of for a large company to bow to pressure on subjects like this. I didn't sign any petitions but when I heard the news my first thought wasn't of Amazon.com's benevolence. I learned my lesson from the last internet fiasco and waited this one out. I just think it's premature to suggest we live in a enlightened time where people are free from sexual orientation prejudices.
It's not that the act is fundamentally unthinkable. It's the preponderance of evidence against this being an intentional plan.
Amazon is a progressive company. They're headquartered in Seattle, a fairly progressive city. Their employees do not enjoy being treated like pariahs.
Amazon's best customers tend to be highly literate people who react to book-banning like they've been personally knifed. And Amazon is smart: The company knows that authors and publishers watch their Amazon sales rankings on an hourly basis (if not minute-by-minute) and will commence an immediate shitstorm if those rankings change in an unusual fashion, let alone vanish. Amazon would have an explanation ready. They would roll any change out carefully. They would have approached someone in the publishing industry to discuss such a drastic move before making it.
Because -- most importantly -- Amazon has a big financial incentive not to ban books. Amazon makes money by selling books. Every GLBT book they don't sell is money they don't make. If they were going to bow to pressure and take thousands of titles off the site the pressure would have to be really costly. Hence, presumably, quite visible. Where is it? And wouldn't the company have tried negotiation, first? Taken one or two shocking-looking titles off the list and then publicized that fact? Or tried the case in public, where librarians and publishers of (nearly) all stripes could help them push back against the pressure?
The very fact that the act blew up so quickly is evidence of how stupid it was. And it's impossible to believe that Amazon is really that stupid. (Though, as has been pointed out, it is easy to believe that an AI is that stupid. Be careful when letting AIs make your business decisions.)
You're acting like censoring GLBT literature is equivalent to not legalizing gay marriage.
That's the rough equivalent of saying that, just because we have a president who hasn't pushed for slavery reparations, "progressive" states like California have disproportionate numbers of minority convicts, and the Supreme Court has saddled us with imperfect affirmative action laws, we shouldn't be surprised about rumors of Amazon censoring black literature.
I really respect Clay for this post (though I am floored that anyone would believe Amazon intended what happened), because it's definitely not socially required to apologize or feel embarrassed for being wrong about anger if the thing was bad enough.
The part about people justifying their anger post-explanation is really true and is present in some of the comments on the post. It seems to mean chastising Amazon for taking too long to address the serious situation – which seems code for giving people too much time to make fools of themselves.
I want to clarify that I don't mean it's foolish to make a scene about real book banning. I mean that it's foolish to get so up in arms over an accusation of book banning without waiting for evidence.
I suspect(and hope) most people don't believe lynch mobs should be permitted in society. What I don't understand is why the electronic equivalent is socially acceptable?
"it was stupid to take as long as they did to dribble an explanation out."
Didn't they answer in a day or two? That is fucking fast, esp for a giant corporation.
and "it was stupid to speak in PR-ese to the public about something that really matters;"
What I remember reading sounded very un PR-ese. Trying to find their press release to reread... They don't have one / I can't find it. That is bad. This is what I read http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp I guess that's not official release.
I meant the figurative meaning of "Lynch mob"(which perhaps only I hold) I should have used "mob justice".
Amazon is a "virtual" person under US Law. I don't like it but it's the reality of corporatism. Amazon can receive justice or injustice. In this case the mob delivered them a heap of injustice.
Does anyone have any good information regarding what actually happened? Amazon's corporate PR and random LJ posts have about the same level of credibility to me; they both have a single objective, to make themselves look good.
The troll did seem a little too perfect, but Amazon's "oops-a-daisy!" explanation doesn't smell so good either. Anyone know the real story? Or at least of substantiation details to make the "official" lines, on either side, sound a little more plausible?
Basically, an employee in France (possibly due to a language barrier) flipped the "adult" bit on a bunch of stuff he shouldn't have, which interacted badly with recent changes to remove adult content from places where kids might stumble across it. It sucks that it affected a bunch of LGBT stuff, but it wasn't intentional.
If you're a developer who is like me, this is exactly the kind of thing you have nightmares about doing, because you know it could happen to anyone. How many times have you typed something, or committed something, and moments later felt the dawning horror of deleting some essential files or missing some essential step? Obviously we erect processes and technical solutions to make it rare for this kind of thing to make it into production, but it still happens.
"Amazon managers found that an employee who happened to work in France had filled out a field incorrectly and more than 50,000 items got flipped over to be flagged as "adult," the source said. (Technically, the flag for adult content was flipped from 'false' to 'true.')"
Oh yeah real technical.
The problem is, without more information, I do not believe a word of that. Filled in a form incorrectly? What form do they have that does that kind of thing? And how can an employee in France cause some kind of cascading re-categorisation of data in the USA?
That explanation sounds like total BS to me. For now, the trolling/CSRF explanation is more likely, IMO. The "troll" has given specific technical details, all of which at least pass the smell test. Amazon's explanation - a foreign employee filling in forms wrong - is just too cute.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to order more tinfoil hats on Amazon ....
I don't think there's been any official explanation, though the 'employee cataloging error in France' has come through journalists with a chance to judge their sources.
The external flag-bombing initially sounded most credible to me -- as with 'Google-bombing', there's a precedent for such campaigns, either by earnest folks with a content agenda or pranksters. And Amazon would have reason to downplay any such explanation, to avoid encouraging copycats. But I don't think people linked to Amazon would lie to cover such an event.
I keep trying to imagine the database query that would have resulted in this particular subset of items being altered the way they were. I guess my imagination isn't that great.
I suspect the troll/CSRF might be the simplest explanation here.
I worked at Amazon for three years. While the company isn't quite as secretive as Google, it's still extremely tight-lipped when it comes to any sort of public statement. Even when being more open would probably be better PR (like in this case), it just goes against the company culture.
For what it's worth, my friends still working at Amazon who went and looked at the trouble ticket and the resulting changes say that it was indeed just a stupid mistake.
Okay, fine, Amazon screwed up and there was a glitch or a security hole or whatever it really was. Their bad, they should fix that and people have a right to be upset that their books lost sales or whatever was the case. But moral outrage? Protest logos? Petitions? People either need to lighten up or get lives that lack the required free time to get that worked up over a conspiracy that was obviously irrational.