Savage is in Hawai’i with spotty Internet access and a broken computer, but he’s got text messaging and my phone number, so allow me to relate his feelings regarding Amazon’s de-ranking books with gay content.

He’s against it.

It’s a freaking high-tech book burning. Mein Kampf and American Psycho not considered “adult” by Amazon, Heather Has Two Mommies—a children’s book—is? And no anti-gay titles affected, so first search on ‘homosexual’ brings up AFA book on preventing your kid from being gay when he grows up!

And my computer is dead!

Amazon is now blaming the problem on a “glitch”, and claims to be “working to correct the problem as quickly as possible.” They are silent as to how exactly it is that this glitch only affected books with gay themes, including Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America by Nathaniel Frank, a scholarly book on military policy and a national bestseller.

As someone with a bit of computer expertise, let me just say, there’s no way in hell this is a glitch.

Some gay-themed material does appear to have retained it’s ranking information, however – see 2008’s classic lesbian rights film Girls Gone Wild: Girls on Girls, for example.

Savage will be back on the mainland on Wednesday.

Anthony Hecht is The Stranger's Chief Technology Officer. He owns no monkeys.

67 replies on “Re: Amazon and the Gay Glitch, Savage Responds”

  1. The more I think about it, the more unlikely I think that Amazon-the-corporate-entity did this on purpose. Bezos is nothing if not a canny businessman, and this would obviously be a terrible business decision. I wouldn’t use a canned response from a customer service rep as evidence of *anything* – I’ve had shipping issues and gotten several responses from them that showed they didn’t understand what was going on at all, but were very willing to respond anyway.

    It makes more sense to me that this would be the result of an employee/hate group taking advantage of a vulnerability in the system.

  2. @51 is OTM. If there’s anything right wingers are good at doing since the beginning of the year is loitering the feedback/comments section of every web site imaginable, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they organized to do something that’s so desperate for attention than this.

  3. I have boycotted Amazon. com ever since they poured money into right wing campaigns. This latest show of their true colors increases my disgust with them. Boycott!

  4. After hearing from people on the inside at Amazon, I am convinced it was in fact, a “glitch.”

    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 this 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.

    Let me know if you actually want more details on how it went down, but it’s pretty boring and technical.

    md

  5. Not sure how it’s a “glitch” given that it’s been going on for months before it received this degree of publicity. Unless Amazon’s staffed by some very unobservant people. I suppose it’s a toss-up between “morons” and “homophobes”.

  6. It’s entirely possible that other incidents/editings are due to other policies–I can only tell you what caused the mass delisting over the weekend.

  9. You’re an idiot if you think your computer experience entitles you to say this wasn’t a glitch. I can think of a dozen ways this could be a glitch, and I didn’t work there. If I did, I could think of a hundred.

  11. @59: Name one that doesn’t have something to do with LGBT issues unfairly being conflated with “adult” topics or “sex.”

    I wish we had used the term “homoaffectionate.” It would be more accurate and focus on feelings instead of sex acts.

  12. OH SO NOW SAVAGE IS PISSED OFF WELL WELCOME TO THE CLUB I GUESS WHEN YOU CANT GET YOUR PORN DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR HOSE AT VASHON OR YOUR STOOL AT RPLACE THEN ITS REALLY OPPRESSION HUH NOT LIKE WHAT SELF-ACTUALIZED QUEERS AND DYKES OF SIZE FACE EVERY DAY WERE ALL UNDER THE OBAMA BUS NOW SAVAGE HOW DOES IT FEEL NOT GOOD HUH

  14. “As someone with a bit of computer expertise, let me just say, there’s no way in hell this is a glitch.”

    Um. I think you are someone who works at The Stranger with a bit of computer expertise compared to other people who work at The Stranger. Someone who truly has a bit of computer expertise would understand that doing what Amazon does is hard.

  15. For all you claiming to know the computer algorhythms behind it all, I challenge your preconceptions. The Amazon classification scheme is not contained in-house, nor is it even machine or policy-based. It is farmed out on an item-by-item basis to workers who accept a small amount per transaction. So you get stay-at-home moms or other folks classifying books according to their own belief systems.

    In this case, as we all know, there is a large segment of the population that is uninformed and has knee-jerk reactions to anything that suggests “gay”. So you can imagine how they will classify the autobiography of an openly gay man (John Barrowman). Without even reading it, they’ll assume there are chapters devoted to…well, all things gay.

    Amazon’s gaffe was not exercising enough control over those contract workers, is all. It is one of the most gay-friendly employers I’ve ever known, and I’m sorry that this happened but it was not something Amazon did intentionally.

Comments are closed.