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.

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?

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.

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.