This Is Not A Glitch, #amazonfail
Since PublisherWeekly’s server seems to be seriously borked with all the traffic, I’ll repost here.
AmazonFail continues apace. An Amazon spokesperson FINALLY released a statement to PW:
Amazon Says Glitch to Blame for “New” Adult Policy
By Rachel Deahl & Jim Milliot — Publishers Weekly, 4/12/2009 5:49:00 PMA groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove adult titles from its sales ranking. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a glitch had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new adult policy.
For most of the weekend on Twitter, in conversations with the hash tag “#amazonfail,” users were discussing the fact that the e-tailer was removing the sales rankings for books that it deemed featured “adult content.” Many readers, and writers, decried the fact that Amazon appears to be removing the sales ranking for titles that feature gay and lesbian characters and/or themes.
The director of the Erotic Authors Association, who goes by the pen name Erastes, told PW that many of her members “noticed their titles had been stripped of their sales rankings” on Amazon. One, Mark Probst, contacted a customer service representative at Amazon and wrote about the exchange on his blog. Probst wrote that the Amazon rep responded to his inquiry by saying that “‘adult’ material” is being excluded from appearing in “some searches and best seller lists” as a “consideration of our entire customer base.”
Whether a glitch or new policy, titles like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain are among the titles who have lost their ranking. (Publishers Weekly, taken in entirety because their site is seriously swamped right now)
This does not wash for two reasons. One, a customer service rep admitted in writing this was “policy”. Saying it is a “glitch” or “not a new policy” is both disingenuous and outright patronizing.
Second, and more compelling reason: A “glitch” would have taken out other books–like, say, Mein Kampf or the disgusting “how to cure homosexuality” screeds. Instead, what we have is a specific targeted campaign, albeit a clumsy and not-very-well-thought-out one.
Now, if Amazon would have stuck to small-press GLBT and incrementally inched toward getting even Lady Chatterley off their search rankings, consumers might have been led further down the primrose path. As it is, between the admission of policy and the fact of the removal of search rankings to cut down the sales of “certain” titles, what we have here is not a glitch but a poorly-executed bit of fuckery that was in no way UNintentional. The only reason this hit big is because of the degree of fuckeration over a short period of time.
(And before you say anything about my use of the term “fuckeration”, let me just warn you that I am incandescently angry right at the moment, and I do moderate comments here.)
The third (small and circumstantial) reason I don’t believe it is because of the timing. Easter weekend? It just happens on a holiday weekend? No, I’m sorry. I will eat fish and I will eat meat, but there is some shit I will NOT eat, and this is a heapin’ helpin’ of it.
Lost in a lot of the hullabaloo is the disability angle and the fact that feminist and female sexuality books were also deranked. This was intentional. I would go so far as to say it was mistaken and probably a committee decision of surpassing corporate blindness, but do not insult my intelligence and tell me it was a “glitch”. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being a hit job by a hate group, as tehdely theorizes–but still, Amazon has not become a huge company by taking weirdo fundies seriously, even weirdo fundies with agendas.
The only flaw I can see with tehdaly’s theory is that sex toys and other “objectionable to someone (or a right wing nut)” material remained up. This happened with books first to test the waters, and Amazon’s previous behavior with trying to take over the POD industry came off initially in very much the same way.
Anyway. The way I feel about this could be summed up in three words. “Glitch, my ASS.” Amazon has just insulted my intelligence, and yours. Bigtime.
ETA: Another reason why this isn’t a “glitch”–it was happening in FEBRUARY.
1. Amazon Censors Search Rankings To “Protect” Us
2. This Is Not A Glitch
3. Still Not A Glitch, But A Policy
4. (Update) Idiosyncratic Code?
5. Why I’m Bothering With AmazonFail
6. (Update) Seattle PI releases Amazon statement
7. Glitch, Ranking, & Porn
8. Days Later, Still AmazonFail
9. Glitch, Monoculture, Profit (AmazonFail Recap)
Related posts:
- Amazon Censors Search Rankings, To “Protect” Us
- Seattle PI has new #amazonfail statement
- Why I’m Bothering With #amazonfail
Tags: amazonfail, books, we are not amused
April 12th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I think Amazon is getting trolled: http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html
April 12th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Thank you! You have stated much better than I could have exactly what I thought when I read Amazon’s “explanation” for what happened. There are no words to describe how angry this whole thing has made me today. I shut down my marketplace account and canceled my prime membership. I will be finding other places to order my books and music.
April 12th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
I also think since this happened back in February the “glitch” should have been caught long before now. Especially since authors had been questioning the change.
It’s also not helpful that Amazon has consistently scored low on the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index.
April 12th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
[...] Amazon’s statement to Publisher Weekly (which has been slash-dotted): Amazon Says Glitch to Blame for “New” Adult Policy By Rachel Deahl & Jim Milliot — Publishers Weekly, 4/12/2009 5:49:00 PM [...]
April 12th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Can’t be a glitch. I work for a large corporation in tech services, investigating failures just like these that have unintended effects. To get to this point, what you should have is the following chain: a proposal is presented, someone has to approve it, then money has to be budgeted for the programming, the code has to be written, the code has to be tested, then a change has to be approved and finally the rollout into production. You HOPE that companies do this and aren’t just pushing any ole code out into production.
Maybe this was a rogue operation on the part of someone at Amazon, but this is a large corporation with a lot of employees. I don’t buy it for a minute. I want to know who approved this and what the rationale was. This is not just a glitch.
April 12th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
[...] Update: Amazon says it’s a “glitch” that they’re in the process of fixing, although I wonder how that squares with what Mark Probst was told. One misinformed customer service rep? Or something else entirely? Another author writes of why she doesn’t buy the “glitch” response. [...]
April 12th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Re, the disability angle, in addition to Lisybabe’s post (which you linked), there is also another great one at:
http://is.gd/s5Xr
April 12th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
I, too, am incandescently angry, as you phrased it. Though in some ways more at the bad logic people suggesting alternate theories are presenting in order to avoid dealing with the implications of the issue. Also the patronizing tone of the customer service reps is infuriating. “Simmer down the rhetoric and wait for the facts.” ? Really?
I do believe it was a SNAFU because I can’t imagine Amazon deliberately taking on some of the big name publishers in this manner, but I don’t believe that it was unintentional. Rather I think that it’s indicative of a more insidious intent that was poorly executed.
It being a glitch in approved software doesn’t make the underlying censorship any less happening.
(I apologise for any errors in phrasing. It’s midnight but I don’t want to wait ’till tomorrow)
April 12th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
[...] An example of such, from Gothic novelist Lilith Saintcrow, from her blog: [...]
April 12th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was delisted by Amazon. As most people know, this book doesn’t even HAVE a gay character — Orlando starts the book as a man, and changes into a woman midway through the novel. But that’s enough for Amazon.
April 12th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
No. Not a glitch. Not someone clicking the wrong radio button either.
Here’s the problem. Look at a lot of the books — say a hundred or so — that have had sales rank removed. Now look at other books by the same authors. Now look at books that have not had the sales rank reduced–including books that are similar to those that had the sales rank removed.
Do View Source. Look at the metadata, all of it.
These books are being “selected” bases on metadata, on tags, and subject headings. I’ve not — yet — figured out what the magic combination is, but this was done by someone creating a complicated sql query that got a lot of titles, and then issuing a command to remove them from the sales ranking process.
So no. Not a glitch. And not just GLBT. Kids books. Feminist heterosexually oriented books. Books about sex for the disabled. Books about coming out. Books about Classical history. Books about queer theory (including, my hand to heaven, the most boring critical theory book, EVER), books about queer history. Biographies about queer people.
But not, thank Cthulu, American Psycho. ‘Cause you know, that’s all like violence and thus art.
April 12th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Amazon customer service line is open 24/7. Contact them NOW and respectfully voice your opinion. 800-201-7575
April 13th, 2009 at 12:14 am
An anonymous commenter on Lisybabe’s post linked to above has a suggestion: “Amazon.com users are using the tagging feature to mark items with ‘amazonfail’ and vote on affected items so people know where to find them. I’ve just added the books you mentioned to the list. I encourage anyone with an existing amazon.com account to go and vote on the tags, so they move up the list and more people become aware of them.”
April 13th, 2009 at 12:40 am
Guys, I’m just not convinced this is a deliberate attack on GLBT. It’s looking pretty likely that there’s some sort of keyword-triggered selector out there, and it’s yanking books that trip too many of its filters. Who knows why — maybe some fundie group’s been badgering Amazon to stop putting GLBT romance novels on its “recommend” list for parishoners or something, I have no idea. But I also don’t see what the upside is for Amazon in deliberately setting their keyword algorithm to discriminate against gays.
I’ve worked with taxonomies and algorithms before, and they can get junky sometimes. You tweak something to solve a problem in one place, and then something goes subtly but catastrophically wrong somewhere else. Given the listing of books that have been deranked (and those that have survived), I think this is just a filter that was overdesigned for one purpose and accidentally wrecked this category.
Also, I keep seeing Amazon quoted as having claimed the removal of those books is “policy” — they never say that, and Mark Probst only uses the term as a catchall. The Amazon note about excluding adult content looks like a pretty generic knock-back to a query about an unlisted adult book; spookily referring to it as “policy” makes it sound like Amazon claimed they had a policy towards LGBT books. Which they don’t. They probably DO have some sort of trigger system that pulls books out of the rankings if their keywords trip too many “adult” sensors, so we might even be talking about some random code monkey inserting a word in the filter without knowing how it would affect the whole system.
And on top of that, this feels like trollery from top to bottom. Find a very vocal group online? Check. Find a mysterious trigger? Check. Unleash the online hounds on a holiday weekend? Check. At the end of the day, there is absolutely nothing Amazon can benefit from by discriminating against gays in book rankings. So I have no idea why anyone thinks this would be deliberate rather than a glitch.
April 13th, 2009 at 1:40 am
Sorry, left this out — the books might not be “testing the waters”, it might be a flaw in the complaint system.
Imagine a customer services rep getting this email through: “This is hugely offensive and it insults my religion and my spirit and I cannot believe you would have this filth on your site, think of the children, mine will never use your site again, I couldn’t believe it when my daughter arrived home carrying this! You are encouraging underage sex of the most perverted, degrading sort, I nearly vomited. Shame, Amazon!”
The rep clicks through the order and sees that the mother’s complaining about a lace teddy. Rep rolls eyes, rejects “mark as adult only, strip of sales rank” query.
OR, she clicks through the order and sees a book. Rep hasn’t read the book, has no access to the book, but the lady emailing seemed pretty sure it was bad. Hmmm….
This might just be a repercussion of some items on Amazon being a very much “what you see is what you get” proposition, while others like books are not as clear. That and bad customer service protocols or user-controlled adult complaint settings. Just… books might not be the first sign of Armageddon.
April 13th, 2009 at 1:54 am
Hmmm, here’s an interesting case. When I read about the “amazonfail” tag people were using to mark affected books, I decided to go take a look at Rita Mae Brown’s listings. I knew _Rubyfruit Jungle_ had been hit and already tagged, but I looked at and tagged a few others. When I went to the page for the mass market paperback edition of _Venus Envy_ (http://www.amazon.com/Venus-Envy-Rita-Mae-Brown/dp/0553564978/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239612570&sr=1-1), it hadn’t been tagged yet (unlike the other two editions that Amazon lists right under the price and shipping data). It also didn’t have any tags identifying it as LGBT either; I added the “lesbian fiction” tag. Looking at the metadata as Lisa Spangenberg suggests, though, has “Literature of special Lesbian interest” under content, which must be how the discussions and communities are generated as they are the only obvert LGBT identifiers on the page. Someone definitely went to some effort on this.
April 13th, 2009 at 1:56 am
[...] Thus #glitchmyass became yet another rallying plea to refrain from insulting intelligent people’ intelligence. [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 3:51 am
[...] it, which is interesting, especially if you read through the comments. More posts about this here, here, here and here. And of course there’s already a [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 4:30 am
[...] here on the unlikelihood of this whole, sad ‘glitch’ [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 5:28 am
Thank you for covering this!
We’re listing the affected books on meta_writer:
http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html
April 13th, 2009 at 5:31 am
[...] This Is Not A Glitch, #amazonfail | Lilith Saintcrow "This does not wash for two reasons. One, a customer service rep admitted in writing this was 'policy'. Saying it is a 'glitch' or 'not a new policy' is both disingenuous and outright patronizing. [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 6:00 am
As of Monday morning, 6:00AM central time, Amazon is still claiming this is a glitch. It’s as if they think this is merely an image issue, and if they repeat the branding tagline of “just a glitch” enough, it will sink in and people will ‘buy’ the glitch theory.
It’s a shame that the people who run one of the larger information distribution systems in the world just don’t get that, yes, information is important to society, and how, when, and where you regulate access to that information makes a difference.
Amazon is more than being flippant when they call this a ‘glitch.’ Amazon is talking down to the public as if we’re a bunch of pre-schoolers who couldn’t possibly begin to understand how a database or a computer works. The terminology of ‘glitch’ is as technical as Amazon dares to get with us neophytes. Not surprisingly, being condescended to in this manner is pissing people off as much as if not more than the original misguided policy that started this whole mess in the first place.
I look forward to the days when alternatives to companies like Amazon are more widespread so that the dissemination of information doesn’t have to be trusted to corporate boobs.
transcript of e-mail from Amazon:
http://www.yudc.com/amazonfail.html
April 13th, 2009 at 6:11 am
[...] (or just want to see what all of the fuss is about), search the #amazonfail hashtag on Twitter, and check out Lilith Saintcrow’s post on the subject here. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Fall Sunday Stats #1: How To Get Run Over By a [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 6:31 am
Be nice to the Amazon people you get on the phone, though. They’re doing customer service for $10.75 an hour at an outsourcing site in Kansas City, KS, and they probably have very little to no stake or say in this mess. It’s a corporate problem, and unacceptable. But don’t tear the phone people’s heads off. (My husband works for the outsourcing company, but not in that department. I anticipate hearing stories.)
April 13th, 2009 at 6:46 am
[...] http://www.lilithsaintcrow.com/journal/2009/04/this-is-not-a-glitch-amazonfail/ [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 7:12 am
[...] “adult” material. I’d have to agree with author Lilith Saintcrow who exclaims “this is not a glitch” (or, as Twitter puts it, “#GlitchMyAss”). While this “glitch” may be [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 7:25 am
[...] What the glitch says about pop culture | Jezebel | On Amazon Trolls, Meta-Failure and Ban-town | Lilith SaintCrow | Smart Bitches, Trashy Books | Meta [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 8:00 am
[...] 13, 2009 Amazon discriminates against gay books: You may have seen some of my Tweets about this Amazonfail/Amazon rank thing. Here is the [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 8:02 am
[...] No Comments Amazon discriminates against gay books: You may have seen some of my Tweets about this Amazonfail/Amazon rank thing. Here is the [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 8:05 am
@Lisa – Dear Author has a spreadsheet up that I think proves the metadata theory.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:46 am
This was linked to on the cnn.com homepage: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10217715-93.html?tag=newsLatestHeadlinesArea.0
At least it’s making the rounds.
*snerk* it even made the foxnews.com homepage, but check the difference in phrasing: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,514923,00.html
April 13th, 2009 at 9:15 am
Considering the thousands of dollars I have spent on Amazon.com over the past five years, I am NOT the kind of customer they want to alienate. I do not give Amazon my hard-earned dollars in order for them to legislate “morality”. I pay Jeff Bezos (the CEO) and his company the big bucks for them to provide a service–which is BOOKS. Whether something is or is not appropriate or “mature content” is not for them to decide.
Of course, like so many other things, it started with GLBTQ books, something guaranteed to be under the radar (or so they thought). It has since moved on to literature with “homosexual content” like ‘Giovanni’s Room’ by James Baldwin and ‘Maurice’ by EM Forester. Now, erotica and erotic romance have come under fire. I guess healthy, egalitarian and consensual expressions of desire are “bad”, but graphic and oftentimes unecessary depictions of violence are “good”.
What a crazy world we live in.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:16 am
“”snort”" Glitch my butt!
The only reason I’m not closing my marketplace account is because I need whatever money I can get.
Thanks for posting the PW article Lili, I’ve been trying since early this morning to read it with no luck – until now.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:14 am
I absolutely do not buy the ‘glitch’ explanation, and have just closed my account. Although I was a frequent customer, this has made me so livid that I don’t want to give Amazon one more dollar, ever.
I’ll add though that the very last purchase I made from Amazon was The Gift of Fear. Thank you so much for recommending it to your readers! I will in turn be suggesting that all of my girlfriends pick up a copy… from Powell’s.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:47 am
[...] and disseminating. Authors tweeted about missing books, readers posted links to breaking news and why-would-Amazon-do-this theories, and a petition demanding that Amazon rescind its adult policy gathered 10,000 names in less than [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
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.
April 13th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Due to the lamentable lack of information from Amazon, it is easy and _possibly_ incorrect to take what we have, and reach conclusions based on it.
The “it’s been going on since February” argument does not, in itself, prove anything. The issue is not really whether some material might be ineligible for ranking (a foolish, in my mind, but fundamentally tolerable if misguided policy), but why whole categories of material suddenly got swept into the that category.
Thus, it is not impossible that the “glitch” that Amazon refers to is a glitch in their systems, not a (just) simple glitch in their software. That (re-)opens the door to the notion that the phenomenon is a consequence of a concerted effort to game those systems.
Or maybe not. But the point is that there is not enough evidence to conclude that the February events are related to the Easter events.
Beyond which, from a purely practical standpoint, it seems to me wildly unlikely that a deliberate corporate strategic policy implementation would occur during a weekend. Typically, sane people roll out new systems and policies overnight so that the full staff would be on hand if things go wrong. This mitigates against it being strategic. But again, this is not proof.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
[...] and disseminating. Authors tweeted about missing books, readers posted links to breaking news and why-would-Amazon-do-this theories, and a petition demanding that Amazon rescind its adult policy gathered 10,000 names in less than [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Right, so now we’re moving on from accusing Amazon of wholesale LGBT-bashing, and instead focusing internet rage on the PR people?
Guys, they probably had no idea what was happening. There were multiple possibilities: code error, algorithm error, user-generated tagging error, hacker or trolling squad. What on earth else COULD they say if they hadn’t identified the cause, other than “you’re right, there’s a glitch, we’re working on it”?
The internet moves very fast, and I think people have forgotten that sometimes it takes time to get to the root of a problem. In this case, they appear to have narrowed things down to a categorization error by the Monday night of the fracas. Considering how much time and resource they must’ve chucked at the system to find the flaw, that’s a pretty good turnaround.
People are expecting PR and Amazon to be omniscient; they’re not. How are they supposed to give a precise answer to the error when they’ve not found it yet?
April 13th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
To Grace above:
Knowing exactly what the error was wasn’t necessary. A simple statement of “We are working to get to the bottom of this and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience” etc. from a spokesperson was necessary and did not happen. The PR people can’t speak if someone doesn’t give them the okay–this is not rage focused at them.
April 14th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
[...] notion of this as a “glitch” or careless error is a tough pill to swallow. Some authors and publishers have received [...]
April 14th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
[...] are some good posts that point out the flaws with Amazon’s explanation: This Is Not A Glitch, #amazonfail Seattle PI has new #amazonfail statement Amazon’s censorship sparks angry protests Amazon [...]
April 14th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
As someone who is disabled and in her early 20s, I greatly appreciate the fact that you commented on the disability angle. I hate what’s happened and the various groups and individuals affected by it, but it’s also rather hard to see people in an uproar about Amazon being homophobic (in their opinions; I cannot comment objectively, obviously) are not talking about the group you belong to. I know there weren’t nearly as many books related to disabilities delisted as those related to homosexuality, but it still needs to be known.