Via Pandagon, this link on what may be behind the Easter Sunday reveal of a corporate policy that makes absolutely no sense:
Writes tehdely:
Now, let’s just put ourselves in Amazon’s shoes. Keep in mind that Amazon is a smug, fairly liberal company headquartered in fucking Seattle of all places and, last I checked, Jeff Bezos is not exactly a Christian fundamentalist. Why on earth would they suddenly censor only a specific group of content that deals with a marginalized and politically active community? Why would this policy change not take the form of a specific policy, but rather of very discriminately flagging only certain titles as “adult” content? Why would this happen over a weekend?
It’s obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as “adult” after too many people have complained about it. It’s also obvious that there aren’t too many people using this feature, as indicated by the easy availability (and search ranking) of pornography and sex toys and other seemingly “objectionable” materials, otherwise almost all of those items would have been flagged by this point. So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find. To the outside world, this looks like deliberate censorship on the part of Amazon, since Amazon operates the web application in question.
This was more or less my question when I started reading about the phenomenon, thanks to our guest poster. Why would Amazon do something like this when it seems to make no business sense? In order to accept this is a deliberate corporate policy, we have to accept that there’s a significant portion of the Amazon audience that is offended by feminist, pro-GLBT, and survivor literature that simultaneously is not at all offended by Playboy and sex toys.
Sure, there are anti-feminists whose tastes run that way, but I strongly doubt that they constitute much of an influential audience segment. The conservative Christians who liberals might suspect of wanting to get rid of pro-LGBT material in favor of books that tackle the topic of how to prevent your kids from catching gay… really also dislike a lot of the other things that aren’t being banned.
Like the author of this LJ post, I suspect this is some sort of programming error which we’ll probably hear about from the company fairly quickly.
Tehdely goes on to suggest that there may be some kind of trolling going on, wherein people are (possibly deliberately?) creating difficulties between Amazon and its target audience, in ways that have been seen on the internets before:
Now let me backtrack for a bit, and talk about a similar event that happened to my own company, Six Apart, back in 2007, called Strikethrough. Here’s how Strikethrough worked:
- Somebody enlists Warriors for Innocence, a “To Catch a Predator”-like organization (but significantly more fundie and batshit) in the battle against “pedophile” content on LiveJournal
- Warriors for Innocence brings down holy Jihad on Six Apart, consisting not only of complaining directly to 6a, but also threatening to involve the media, as well as directly threatening companies like Google, which advertised on LiveJournal, to pull their ads, lest they be viewed as supporters of pedophilia
- Six Apart, faced with a sudden and unexpected and multipronged attack, reacts rashly, and in an unannounced and unexplained policy change bans thousands of accounts from LiveJournal for listing certain sensitive keywords in their profiles, without the chance for appeal, and hopes that WFI will leave them alone
- The ban ends up targeting mostly fiction writers, and is so sweeping that it includes communities for discussing famous works of literature, rape and incest survivor communities, and more. The collateral damage is massive
- Butthurt users rise up en masse and create a shitstorm the likes of which Six Apart hadn’t seen since the “Boob Nazi” debacle
- With its tail between its legs, Six Apart backpedals. Not too long afterward, LiveJournal is sold to SUP, who quickly roll back many of the more objectionable policy changes
That, my friends, is pure Bantown. What is Bantown? Some things Bantown is not:
- A trolling organization
- A group of people (at least since 2007)
- An IRC channel
Bantown is a tactic for inciting meta-lulz on multiple levels through the alignment of third-parties against each other. Bantown is like the plot of most James Bond movies, wherein some nefarious evildoer brings the US and the Soviets close to war. Bantown is a trolling technique of the highest order, which usually pits communities against each other, or communities against companies, or organizations against companies, or companies against organizations.
Tehdely also points out that “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.”
This is certainly an interesting theory.
I suspect we’ll hear from Amazon in the next day or two. And if we don’t, well. I’ll certainly cancel my newly acquired Prime account. But since there’s something in the equation “1) piss off a large segment of your consumer base without actually making a larger segment happy, 2)…, 3) profit” that doesn’t quite add up for me, I’m going to go ahead and operate with the benefit of the doubt for a few days.
@CharlesS: Vance thinks he's king, but doesn't realize that he isn't even venomous?