"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." -- Napoleon Bonaparte



It has been discussed all weekend on Twitter, and now the phenomenon dubbed 'Amazonfail' has now made it to news sources such as The Guardian and the New York Times websites. It went from almost unheard of, to being discussed all over the internet. The Twitter discussion is still ongoing.

Amazon announced that it would be removing adult material from it's searches. It did this by removing the sales ranking from books, meaning that they no longer show up in the bestseller list or the main site search. Is this so bad? Surely Amazon is not the first site to filter out adult material, and many people would surely like the option to filter it out. Yet, its implementation of this policy seems to be haphazard and ill-thought out at best, and horribly discriminatory at worst.

While the Twitter discussion happened recently, Amazon's policy on 'adult' material has been ongoing since at least February. Writer Craig Seymour, author of a memoir of his time as a gay stripper, posted on his blog regarding his book having it's sales rank removed by Amazon. He was informed by them that his book was considered adult. On further inspection, other memoirs by gay writers were also unranked, but the memoirs of straight porn stars and strippers were not.

On the 12th of April, writer Mark Probst posted on his livejournal about LGBT books having sales rankings removed at a very fast rate. On Twitter, the discussion was growing quickly, with the hashtag '#amazonfail'. Smart Bitches, Trashy Books made up a humourous new definition of 'AmazonRank'. A petition was created. It seemed to be a lot of fuss over something not quite solid. A facebook group was also set up, both as a protest against the policy and a place to gather information from the incredibly rapidly updating Twitter discussion and store it.

What was Amazon doing? Are they homophobic? Discussion seemed to arrive at a consensus of yes. Though it soon became apparent that it was not only LGBT books that are being deranked. This blog post talks about the disability discrimination angle. The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability, amongst other books, is deranked. The issue was no longer just a LGBT issue, it affected people with disabilities as well, and people who belong to both communities.

Whilst looking into this, I found a list of deranked books was still being compiled by meta_writer. It includes books such as Toni Weschler's Cycle Savvy: The Smart Teen's Guide to the Mysteries of Her Body, Kate Bornstein's Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws which is far from adult, as a self-help book, and Leslea Newman's gay-positive children's book, Heather Has Two Mommies. These books can hardly be considered adult material, yet these along with many other non-sexual books, and books discussing sex but not containing any, are deranked. This blog post talks more about the books targeted, including feminist literature, books for people with disabilities, and, oddly, Lady Chatterly’s Lover (which, on Twitter, prompted people to ask ‘What is it this, 1928?’). Ellen DeGeneres' biography is deranked. So is the biography of Stephen Fry.

Sex toys, pornographic material, erotica (including gay and lesbian erotica, strangely, given the nature of delisted books) and Playboy books featuring many pictures of nude women, still show up in the searches. Rape porn and books on bestiality are still searchable. Surely anyone with a modicum of common sense would have deranked those things first? They are still there, while in this article there is an image of the Amazon search for 'homosexuality', which includes books such as A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality and You Don't Have To Be Gay. Searching ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ on Amazon finds erotica, but not books discussing sexuality or sociology textbooks on sexuality.

While Twitter is not the ideal communication network for discussion, with messages limited to 140 characters, and the tendency of many people to copy and paste previous discussion, it grew very rapidly and created an internet ruckus. Due to Twitter's size and popularity with people of all ages, the issue reached many sites, which other media picked up on. Writers such as Susan Orlean and Neil Gaiman were also part of the discussion, which arguably sped it up.

It didn't take long for the media outside of the blogosphere and Twitter to notice. The Los Angeles Times posted an article. Concern over the deranking of books is expressed. It could be argued that they didn't remove the books, therefore, they are still available, but there are more concerns than simply being able to find the books. It became an issue of censorship. While it is within Amazon’s rights to do business how they please, is it correct to hide those books? Did they have a real basis for what was adult and what was not? I say no.

Amazon responded, finally, claiming that the deranking was a 'glitch'. Very few people believe this, understandably. Though a computer problem in a system designed to filter content could potentially take down too much, or the wrong items, the sheer amount of literature taken down is astonishing, and it seems to be mainly focused on minorities. This post details the reasons that the glitch is likely a PR announcement to save face.

While it would be bad if Amazon were truly a discriminatory company, at the moment we have little information on what their real intentions were. Perhaps some employees got carried away and used this system to purpote their own ideals. Perhaps a program designed to derank things automatically was badly written. Dear Author theorises that it may be due to the metadata of the tags given to Amazon’s products. I personally feel that ‘amazonfail’ is more likely down to human error than a computer problem. It may be prudent to give them the benefit of a doubt. We should neither hold the entire company responsible, nor absolve them all of responsibility. Something went badly wrong somewhere.

Some think it was an outside job, as this hacker claims to have perpetrated #amazonfail by use of the 'Report Inappropriate Content' feature on Amazon's items. However, his claims are later debunked. The claim that hackers may have done it is not implausible. The fact that there is no 'Report Inappropriate Content' feature on Amazon's items takes more credability away from that particular hacker's claim, though. If that was the case though, why would Amazon claim it was a glitch? Surely the revelation that it was a malicious prank would bring people back to Amazon’s side. Why hasn’t Amazon fixed the problem, or shown that they have attempted to? That is discussed here.

Recent news has an anonymous coder from Amazon state that 'I can’t find the actual actual root cause, but it looks like someone internally changed 58K asins to be adult - whether that was accidental or intentional I couldn’t say, but we’re rolling it back.' It now seems like the problem is internal, and unlikely to be a hacker's work. It seems that someone inside Amazon is responsible for it's mistake. Whether intentional, or incompetence, is up in the air at the moment.

It is up to Amazon to fix this, though the damage to their reputation has already been done they must try. So far a number of the deranked books have been restored, but some writers still feel insulted.

Another issue raised is, is the Amazonfail trend a lot of hot hair over very little? It certainly wouldn't be the first time that internet users have overreacted, but the statements issued by Amazon, contradictory to previous ones, seem to be fueling the fire still. First it was stated to be a glitch, then a cataloging error, and now the result of a French employee's error. Amazon's public relations department should learn from this series of mistakes.

In a more recent article, Amazon has issued a statement stating that they made an 'embarrassing and ham-fisted' mistake. Yet there is no statement about the emails sent to authors informing them of their new policy. It is an admission of guilt, yet at the same time it doesn't seem right. At no point has Amazon given an apology to the people this incident has offended.

Perhaps that, and not the errors they have made, is the true Amazonfail.