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.
I’d buy this theory more if this hadn’t been going on more surreptitiously for weeks, and when the initial authors who were subject to the “deranking” questioned it, were told by Amazon that it was due to an Amazon policy change. Only after the twitterstorm and the google bomb did Amazon start saying things like “glitch”.
I think both could be true. There may well have been a policy change that if a certain number of users tagged a product as “adult,” it would be delisted, without an actual intent on the part of Amazon to target LGBT and feminist books and authors. It may not have occurred to them that people would abuse the system so egregiously, and they may not have had proper human oversight of the process, making sure that tagged books really were “adult” by some non-political standard (though such standards are always political to some degree). I guess I’m inclined to believe this version because I’ve seen it happen repeatedly wherever things can be automatically tagged. I know of several midwife bloggers who kept getting shut down on popular blogging platforms because people would tag their birth photos as “obscene” or “adult content.” It’s been an issue on Facebook, where pictures of women nursing their babies have been tagged as obscene, often by people who have no connection to the women in question, that is, no reason to be looking at their profiles other than to police them.
When authors first started complaining, the customer service drones probably just stuck with the company line – tell anyone who complains it’s a new policy, probably without even reviewing the books in question and whether it was appropriate to tag them as adult – and people higher up the food chain may well not have known a pattern was emerging. When people started flipping out and writing about it and canceling accounts, all of a sudden they realized something bigger was going on than one or two disgruntled authors.
So I don’t buy that it was a “glitch,” per se, but I also have enough room for the benefit of the doubt to think they didn’t set out to target the authors and books who were targeted. My own suspicion is they set up an automated system, then got gamed by people with an agenda, and I hope they seriously reconsider both the merits of having that automated system at all, and instituting a customer service policy that actually listens to people and takes them seriously.
I should add that I think it’s interesting how the profit motive changes the dynamic. In the other cases, the complainers win out, not necessarily because the company buys into their political agenda, but because if the company goes to bat for the people being tagged, it means more work for them – continuously following up on complaints and making value judgments about each individual one. It’s easier to get rid of the content that’s upsetting people, because while that content is important to the person who put it up, the company makes more or less the same amount of money either way.
Here, it’s in Amazon’s financial interest to do the right thing – and in a big way, too.
I’m taking more seriously the theories advanced by someone like tehdely, who has actual tech experience, than those advanced by people who have never programmed anything in their lives. With regard to any large institution — government, publicly-traded corporations, etc. — never assume malice where multiple layers of incompetence explains everything.
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I’m not buying it. Amazon does not have an easy way for items to be flagged as adult. The customer tagging system could only affect ranking if Amazon automatically de-ranked anything tagged as “adult” without any human oversight. If this had been their policy, then they would have realized that it was having problematic and unintended consequences when authors first began complaining back in February.
They may not have intended to discriminate against LGBT/feminist/etc. books, but they knew it was happening months ago, and didn’t give a damn until it exploded in their faces.
Elena,
From what I understand, there was a single author who complained in February that he didn’t have a sales rank on the amazon page for his book “All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C.” (Just guessing, but this book probably has some genuinely adult content.) He got the sales rank back two days after he contacted Amazon about it. And apparently one can create a code to have items reported as “inappropriate,” though I’d have to ask a programmer whether this really would work.
Okay, but if Amazon’s “adult” tag is indeed assigned by users, then it seems to me this could have been pulled off by a well-organized right-wing mobilization. …I don’t hear anyone saying that??
The “right wingers don’t like Playboy and sex toys” thing doesn’t seem like enough of argument to me… they could still have been right-wingers specifically targeting Queer and feminist books for very specific reasons.
Tim,
I think that was implicit in the livejournal being quoted in the OP, which refers to an attack done by “Warriors for Innocence, a “To Catch a Predator”-like organization (but significantly more fundie and batshit).”
Sure. But it’s not going to be Amazon doing it for a profit motive, because that makes no sense.
Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here’s a nice piece I like to call “how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code”.
I really hate reputation systems based on user input…
I’m logged into Amazon at a far later date and see it has a “report as inappropriate” feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.
I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently….
BTW, I strongly recommend no one respond to the guy on his post. I don’t know his individual politics, but I’d bet he’s akin to the fuckers we get ’round here occasionally — his use of the word “fag” etc is probably specifically because he thinks it’s funny when other people are hurt. If there was another hot button, he’d press that one. That’s still bigoted behavior, of course, so I don’t mean to suggest he’s not a homophobic cobag, but it’s got a slightly different motivation (and invites a slightly different response) than run-of-the-mill douchebaggery.
Disability and sexuality books were also targeted, btw:
http://lisybabe.blogspot.com/2009/04/amazonfail.html
I haven’t decided what I think of the guy. I mean, look at the second paragraph. It has all the hallmarks of “humor via being offensive and edgy.” I think it’s all an attempt to be funny. He’s just not as good at it as the best comics are. Not at all. Rather than being offensive to Power (Bruce, Pryor, Carlin, etc.), he’s offensive to the oppressed (Clay and a million other poor excuses for stand up comedy).
So, without knowing what this person is like and what his motivation for the backstory, I hesitate to label him. I have no problem with labeling the back story as bigoted, though.
I linked to the same entry that Mandolin did in #11 over in the first Amazon-related post.
As a customer service drone myself, let me say that if they were getting complaints that whatever they changed wasn’t working right, there’s a good chance that anyone with the power to fix it didn’t hear about it because they regularly ignore their front-line CSRs. I’d say it’s as likely as that they didn’t care about it when single writers complained (or the entire erotic romance ebook publishers who got deranked, or anybody else who’s spoken up.)
One of the reasons people start scanning and answering by cut-and-paste is because in most companies you can spend months trying to get things actually fixed, and then realize that nobody cares about anything but closing tickets & wait-for-response times. You’re going to get a raise/get your boss a raise by not-answering the same question 5 times with a 1 minutes 30 second call time, than by finding someone, somewhere in the organization, who will recognize and fix the problem and stop the calls and emails from coming in.
Assuming the complaint reached a human and not an automated system at all.
(I’m no longer in customer service, I moved to QA about 10 weeks ago. They still ignore me when I say stuff is broken, but they don’t write in my annual review that I care too much about this stuff and it makes me less efficient.)
Rosa,
That’s one thing I like about some online FAQs and even email responses — there’s a way to rate the usefulness of the answer, and hopefully that’s part of what the answer’ers get rated on.
Ugh Rosa, I used to work in technical support for a large company and that is exactly the dynamic I used to have to deal with. Now, I do technical support and customer service for a small company where everyone, including the CEO, cares what I have to say. I am amazed at how quickly things get fixed.
Ahh, of course. It’s that schmuck Weev again. For those who don’t know who he is, he’s basically the Internet’s answer to pubic lice. Just a troll, nothing more.
Of course, this guy does have a reputation for grandstanding, so it may not have been him even as he claims it is. But if it wasn’t, it was probably some other troll.
Rosa said:
Yeah. This is pretty much “customer service” in a nutshell at most companies. I have to admit that I work someplace where this is often the norm (thankfully, I’m not in CS). Give the customer enough BS and eventually most of them go away.
Then you only have to really respond to the ones that actually file a BBB complaint.
It’s a pretty evil way to go about it. But that’s what happens when PROFIT and STUPID MANAGEMENT are combined.
As a frequently-published freelance writer with a college degree, I am somewhat puzzled by the derogatory and dismissive use of a term like “droid” to refer to customer service people. I have frequently been in the position of taking customer service jobs to make ends meet. We English majors often find ourselves in such spots. This was true before the current recession/depression, and is much more so now.
I was laid off (for the fifth time in ten years) a few days before Christmas. I now find myself back in the struggle to survive, and looking — once again — for a customer service position. I do not consider myself a droid. As a dedicated progressive, I am also not accustomed to hearing others on the Left insult working people that way. As a disproportionate number of customer service people happen to be women, it is especially unusual to hear us dismissed this way in comments posted on a “Feminist” blog.
Hopefully I can find a job that does not force me to demean myself by taking a dreaded customer service “droid” role once again. Perhaps then all the top-level executives on the blogs I read — who sneer at us for having achieved a far lower level of socioeconomic success than they have — will then have one less reason to sneer at me.
I think I was the first person to do that. It was drone, not droid, but I should have just said “customer service people.” When I reached for that word, what I was thinking of was the way these people are used within many corporate organizations, not intending to insult the individuals. I understand that when I have problems, it’s not the fault of the front-line customer service reps. They’re just trying to get through the day at a job where they deal with pissed off customers all day and managers putting lord-knows-what kinds of pressure on them from the other side. But I should have thought of how it would sound to those who have worked in the industry. I winced when I read Rosa’s comment @ 16, and I should have apologized then. So I’ll apologize now. Sorry.
A good article on this, by Richard Eoin Nash:
http://rnash.com/article/amazonfail-a-straight-white-male-publisher-on-glitches-and-ham-fisted-error/
I understand, Chingona. I’ve read enough of your comments to know you want to be a part of the solution. This is just a really sensitive time for a lot of people. Apology accepted and appreciated.
As for the Amazon thing, I will purchase nothing else through that company until I am sure they are dealing with us in good faith. The editor of a magazine for which I regularly write saw her own book — which was for GLBT people of faith and had nothing to do with sex per se — de-listed and treated as hotsy-totsy “adult” material. Let’s hope Amazon stops channeling Oliver Cromwell and censoring its books soon.