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AmazonFail: Is Amazon the victim of conservative cyber-vandals?
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After the disasterous weekend, with the internet abuzz over a new policy to remove sales rankings from books deemed "adult," a new theory is developing that Seattle-based Amazon was the victim of conservative cyber-vandals. It was discovered that Amazon has been removing the sales rank from certain books (which identifies how popular the book is in total sales), effectively removing the book from most of the general searches people would do. If it doesn't show up in the search, most people won't find the book, and won't buy it.
Most of the books identified as "adult" and removed from the search were books about homosexuality, including the classic children's book "Heather has Two Mommies". Bloggers across the internet have been getting upset over what appears to be homophobia on the part of Amazon.
But today, Amazon is reporting that this issue is actually due to a "glitch" in their system, and vowing to get it fixed immediately. "We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We're working to correct the problem as quickly as possible," said a statement issued by Amazon.
Now a new theory is starting to circulate, that in fact, there was a glitch in the system, and that glitch was abused by people wanting to hurt Amazon. Here is the theory:
On each book is a feature allowing customers to tag a book with words to help people search. Someone might tag a book about Britney Spears with the words "popstar" or "meltdown", words potentially related to the book. If a book was tagged "adult" enough times, it is possible that Amazon had a system in place to remove the sales rank and remove it from the search engine, perhaps until a live person could double check it. This would fit with the statement from a customer service representative over the weekend that this was a new policy about "adult" content.
Now, a group of people makes a concerted effort to tag books they don't like with the "adult" tag, knowing the automated system will remove them from the search. Reports have surfaced that authors have been discovering their books removed from search as early as February of this year. At that time, they complained and Amazon put the books back in the search.
This weekend is when many people became aware of the fact that so many books were disappearing, hence the firestorm. Some on the internet find it odd that the cat would be let out of the bag on Easter weekend, a religious holiday when few staff would be on hand at Amazon to deal with the fallout.
I'm generally not a conspiracy theory fan, but this has a certain ring of truth to me. Trusting the crowd to rate content is pretty common across the internet, so for Amazon to have instituted an automated feature like this would not be surprising. In fact, as I noted in my previous report, one of the books that did not disappear from search is "For The Bible Tells Me So", a positive look at homosexuality with a biblical perspective. This actually supports this theory- someone trying to eradicate books that support homosexuality might easily think this one was opposed based on the title.
Amazon is not generally considered a homophobic company, and certainly it doesn't help their business model. After my initial shock, I am going to go with this theory. It makes more sense to me.
Read more on this theory: On Amazon Failure, Meta-Trolls, and Bantown
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