Amazon Fail, Monday morning edition

[threeplusfire]

Amazon says "It's a glitch!" But doesn't apologize or clarify or make any attempt to assure customers this won't happen again.

Why calling it a glitch is failboat.

GalleyCate senior Editor Ron Hogan was the Gay & Lesbian studies editor at Amazon from 1998 to 2000. He posts some serious questions about the situation.

Quoted from rm:
# Annoyance that people got up in arms about this because obviously it wasn't going to turn out to be as nefarious as it seemed.

Public outrage is the Stick of Efficiency. Accidental bias is still bias and still creates a problem. This matter getting public attention in a manner that was largely civilized was useful. If it hadn't gone down this way, authors affects would still be trying to sort this out with Amazon a month from now, as demonstrated by several cases of books that were affected by this nonsense as early as February.

Being passive or silent even in the face of "accidental" bias is just as lame as condoning it.

The Guardian reports on it

Oh how I love it when a company says "it's policy" only to waffle later and declare no such policy exists!

I'm removing my Amazon wishlist, and I would like to state for the record that I will not buy anything from Amazon until the situation is rectified. For me, that means a public apology for allowing this to go on for months, for pretending like computers just up and do crazy things to embarrass you and for behaving as some customers/writers/artists are less worthy than others.

(I'm so deeply annoyed that we purchased our new Roomba through Amazon this past month. Ugh.)

Comments

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

Any minute now some Amazon PR hack will claim it was a "social experiment." Yeah, okay. Off to Powell's.

[solstice-singer.livejournal.com]

I heard about all this crap, and was thoroughly disgusted by it. I can't believe they're trying to pull something like this. I don't plan to buy anything from them either, until this mess is straightened out.

[akemi42.livejournal.com]

About the questions raised by the former Amazon rep. It makes more sense to answer #2 first...

Answer to #2: The rep stated policy because their is a filtering policy. I just doubt is it is explicitly or implicitly anti-GLBT.

Answer to #1: Because the coding and algorithms to enforce said policy changes a lot. In February there were mistakes and there are mistakes now. There will probably be mistakes in the future.

I just don't buy that Amazon has an anti-gay agenda.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

All the more reason for them to say "Oh shit guys, X happened and Z happened and this is our specific policy and we'd like to paologize by having a LGBT booksale/make donations/sponsor X event" and get their PR guys on the ball. Why else have a PR department?

While it may not be company policy, I wouldn't find it too far fetched to find this a case of management with bias gone horribly wrong.

[akemi42.livejournal.com]

The problem is that those things take tons of time in big companies...even big companies run like small startups.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

See, I don't buy that at all. I've worked for big companies, dot coms and the state with DFPS. I know for a fact if something exploded PR wise for the state, they would have someone in front of a microphone with a statement by the next day. Amazon's PR people need a swift kick because they are really falling down on this one.

[brienze.livejournal.com]

Rick is the only one who ever buys things out of my Amazon wishlist. I'll probably still use it for convenient bookmarking, but do everything I can to actually buy stuff elsewhere. Rick used to get a lot of import CDs from them, but he recently discovered bittorrent so he's still in the middle of making lists of who he likes well enough to buy.

[horosha.livejournal.com]

Programming glitch? Are you kidding me? For a company as large as Amazon to have a "glitch" like this is unfathomable, and is one of the usual stumps PR people roll out when something involves technology and go wrong. This is code that specifically targets certain materials. Maybe policy was the reason for targeting, or some other reason inherent in Amazon's system. But nobody should believe the "glitch" line.

[alteredhistory.livejournal.com]

Hacker Claims Credit For Amazon's Gay-Themed Book 'Glitch'
http://www.pcworld.com/article/163024/hacker_claims_credit_for_amazons_gaythemed_book_glitch.html

[bizetsy.livejournal.com]

Proof that it's been going on since at least last August:

http://lisnews.org/amazon_hides_sales_rank_certain_books

[water-damage.livejournal.com]

i heart you again amanda. you've had that wishlist for so long now. are you hopping ship to another wishlist?