#amazonfail

An interesting theory has been put forward by tehdely (a former Bantown troll) concerning the whole #amazonfail mess - to wit: that Amazon has been the butt of a subtle and unpleasant trolling.

As a basic summation for anyone who hasn't been following the shitstorm that blew up over on Twitter over the holiday weekend, Amazon suddenly started to blacklist any books with LGBT content from appearing in best-seller lists or search results - in fact, anything that had been tagged as "adult". Complaints received a stock response from Amazon:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

tehdely has theorised that Amazon must have some kind of automatic procedure in place that flags an item as "adult" only after receiving a certain number of complaints about it - you can still find sex toys in search listings, for instance, but of one particular book by Stephen Fry you'll only get the hardback version - because unlike the paperback version, it hasn't been tagged as "gay". So someone - or a group of someones - has been going through tags and using Amazon's own procedures against it, on a major holiday when the customer service department will be operating a skeletal staff (hence the stock response to all the complaints received thanks to #amazonfail). So you end up with a lot of annoyed authors and a very angrily vocal LGBT crowd Tweeting and blogging about it, resulting in a massive PR embarassment for Amazon.

Obviously this has highlighted a definite procedural fail in Amazon's systems - they should not have been so easy to game, after all. But it does beg the question of just who it was who gamed the tagging system? Presumably we are meant to leap to the conclusion that it was religious fundamentalists, particularly as the top results now on a search on "homosexuality" are all Christian books on how to give up being gay. I suspect however that the real culprits are anonymous internet trolls, who no doubt are sitting back and laughing as once again, religious fundametalists and the LGBT movement are at each other's throats with Amazon unwittingly caught up in the middle, "all for teh LULZ!!"