[Fosco thanks his former student Laura for pointing out the following problem.]
Something is seriously amiss at Amazon. As I noted earlier, Amazon has removed many gay/lesbian books from its ranking system because they are considered "adult." While this is repulsive in and of itself, there is a further problem. Apparently, these books are being excluded from searches at the site. Otherwise, how might you explain the results of an Amazon search for the word "homosexuality"? Here is the screen shot (click to see it full-sized):
Yes, it appears that the top search result for "homosexuality" is a book that claims to be a guide to preventing homosexuality. Note, this book's Amazon sales rank is #119,767. And yet, somehow it is the top hit for a search of the term "homosexuality." Does this seem problematic to you? Yeah, me too.
Please join the Amazon boycott until this problem is resolved.
N.B., for those of you who are wondering, the only way to prevent possible homosexuality in your kids is to not have kids. For any parents who are worried about this, I highly recommend that solution.
UPDATE: As AEJ notes in the comments below, this does not seem to be a policy decision on Amazon's part. As of 4/14/09, I am rescinding my call for a boycott. Hooray! I can spend 10% of my income at Amazon again!
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Sunday, April 12, 2009
Amazon's Attitude Toward Homosexuality
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3 comments:
This is an interesting wrinkle - a hacker is claiming credit for this whole thing, saying he created an exploit that takes advantage of Amazon's "Mark this as inappropriate" tag. Of course, I'd be happy to hear that this was indeed not something Amazon did itself, so I'm trying not to allow my preference for this to be true to outweigh reasonable skepticism; still, I would say it's plausible. (Both because this type of filtering would be idiotic as a business move, and Amazon isn't usually idiotic, and because there is a whiff of mischief about the whole thing - from the beginning I've thought this had to be the work of an individual, whether within Amazon or not, rather than corporate policy.)
-AEJ
More at Ars Technica.
-AEJ
This will be my last comment - sorry to keep coming back, but I've been really bothered by this so I keep looking for news and I'm just passing along stuff as I hear it... Anyway, there are now conflicting stories - see these two posts on Salon - coming out of Amazon (not surprising, since as others have noted they hardly want to admit either to being hacked or to doing this intentionally) - but the upshot is that there are apparently something close to 58,000 titles affected and they're fixing it now. Whether someone outside actually found a vulnerability and pranked them or someone in France (really? France is our scapegoat?) mistagged stuff or whatever, I think the possibility that this is a corporate policy is vanishingly small. As the Amazon spokesperson put it, "embarrassing and ham-fisted," definitely; the good news is I think it really was a coding debacle rather than a homophobic salvo. So while I'm still irked, as others have noted, that they haven't just apologized to the writers and readers affected, I'm taking some small solace in the current look of things.
-AEJ
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