On Sunday evening, watching the #AmazonFail fiasco evolve on Twitter kept us up all night. Books with gay and lesbian themes were all marked as “adult” and dropped from best seller lists and rankings and their authors — including people like Michaelangelo Signorile and Andrew Sullivan — were all left wondering what had happened. The ensuing firestorm of protest has kept #AmazonFail as top trending topic on Twitter for two days now.
Since then, well-known hacker-troll Weev has stepped forward and claimed responsibility for the entire episode, saying he did this to get back at the gay dudes that were flagging down his ads on Craigslist when he was trying to “score chicks to do heroin with” (HUH? was our response). Weev also says he managed to expose the vulnerability of Amazon’s adult reporting function by hiring an army of people in the third world.
That would all be great if true, except Amazon has now issued a further clarification saying that its own error, and not the hacker, was responsible for what happened. In an email to Valleywag, Patty Smith, director of corporate communications said:
This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
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 the books from Amazon’s main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.
Thanks for checking in. Best regards -
Patty
We’re still not quite sure what to think about all this, so we turned to Mark Probst, one of the gay authors whose titles have been affected:
I’ve been contemplating how to respond to the statement from the Amazon representative as reported by Publisher’s Weekly. Of course, the knee-jerk reaction was – They’re lying. After some careful thought, I realized, no I don’t think they were. Amazon is undoubtedly embarrassed, and they are trying to set things right.
I quote Publisher’s Weekly, “There is no new adult policy.” A lie? The key word there is “new.” Not providing a sales ranking for adult material, a policy explained to me by the customer service rep, is actually an old policy. Evidence: Here’s a report from April 2008 that hints at the policy www.businessinsider.com
“A glitch had occurred in its sales ranking system” Is that the truth? Oh, you betcha. Though the glitch was most likely human error in that while attempting to find a lazy way to conform to the “old” policy of not ranking adult material, a horrible miscalculation was made and many not-so-adult books fell into the trap.
So my guess is, yes Amazon has a policy in place not to display the sales rankings of adult material, but no, they never intended for gay and lesbian material, per se, to be classified as “adult.” It’s a major faux-pas which I’m sure they mean to correct.
Hmm…
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