Amazon's Gay Book 'Glitch': What Really Happened?

Enchanted April

For some reason, you seem intellectually invested in the hacker narrative, and any reticence from Amazon you interpret as a a cover-up of no possible thing in the universe but a hacking. The motivation you fail to consider is Amazon's determination not to admit that anti-gay bias was involved in any way.


I would like to know why the “flip” affected only gay & lesbian subject matter or – in the words of Amazon – “a broad number of categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive and Sexual Medicine, and Erotica.” Amazon emphasized the latter to suggest that gay content wasn’t targeted, but what do all those areas have in common?


Definitely the likelihood that they would touch on homosexuality. Knitting, woodworking, mathematics, the American Revolution, the cavalier poets, scholastic philosophy, the Arian Heresy and the history of baseball seem to have come through unscathed.


The works that were affected were obviously tagged in some way that targeted them. Not every book in Reproductive and Sexual Medicine was de-ranked. Books fall into more than one category. What painted the target on a particular book was evidently some identification with gay and lesbian subject matter. When will Amazon stop denying this?


It seems probable to me that if a cataloguer did make a "ham-fisted" error it was an error affecting content flagged as gay-relevant. Either he believed he was acting according to company policy, or he acted on his own prejudices, or it really was a wrong keystroke. But whatever he did, he did it to gay-themed content.


Amazon won't even admit that gay content was particularly targeted, and anybody probing further might be getting stonewalled lest he find out there are homophobic employees within Amazon.


There are homophobic employees just about everywhere except GLAAD, so if this is really the handiwork of one idiot in France, Amazon might as well cop to his motivations. On the other hand, they might then have to explain why a large body of gay-related content had been carved out of the entire database AT ALL, for anything whatsoever to be done to it.

Amazon.com

For some reason people fail to accept that this was clearly a mistake. Obviously nobody did their homework to find out that Amazon is probably the most gay friendly employer in the UNIVERSE. Their campus is the most diverse free flowing place for homosexual , lesbians and trans gendered persons. So shut the F***K up everyone and do your homework before speaking out.

Even if they aren't homophobic...

Amazon.com is a lovely company in most respects. I enjoy using them often. I have also seen them at Pride parades, and know that they are very queer friendly.

However, companies these days must understand that they are expected to give actual responses to consumers, and to do so quickly. If they had given an actual answer quicker, as well as an apology (Because it was one of their people who committed the error.), then there would have been little problem. The fact that they won't own up to it and will say very little about it appears suspicious, and at the very least is an irritating behavior to see.

Furthermore, if a company has a glitch in its software, why should consumers have much confidence in the company if they do not seem concerned about resolving it? Amazon may have been working behind the scenes to fix it, but no one was telling the rest of the world about it.