Amazon Removed Gay Books from Rankings

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by kad032000

FYI, if you truly, truly have a problem with them filtering anything at all, then you may have a legitimate stance to argue from. But then, you probably shouldn't be posting on a forum board that has rules and moderators...

I'm not with the torches-and-pitchforks mob, but I think there's a substantial difference between posting on a board with moderators and buying from a store that deliberately hides some of its merchandise so you have to know exactly where to look to find it, regardless of intent. I'm inclined to agree that Amazon-the-corporation did not mean to be discriminatory against the GLBT community in this case, but this kind of programming glitch is one of many reasons why broadly applied filtering -- whether the customer wants it or not-- is a bad idea. I think Amazon would meet its customers needs much better by allowing customers to select the areas of their store that they don't want included in searches, rather than making assumptions about what any specific customer would consider acceptable.

I won't boycott them over this. But I did cancel my Prime membership recently due to several other things they've done. At the present time, I'd rather buy from Powell's or Fictionwise.

[CathalMagus]

hogleg, you must have misunderstood me. I do believe this was probably an innocent series of glitches at Amazon and not a deliberate policy. People were quite right to defend Amazon the company as probably not deliberately responsible for the de-ranking (particularly when a conceivable explanation was offered). But I was commenting on the fact that some people were jumping in to defend the "new policy" which they thought Amazon had brought in.

Also, no-one discussed "forcing" Amazon to do anything, there was just a rather large spontaneous online protest. Surely within the bounds of the usual corporate/consumer relationship, just massively speeded up because of current online media.

[Sonist]

Non-user initiated filtering should be a no-no, period.

Most users would be unaware of such filtering, and would be thus deprived of the ability to access all content. Moreover, for most users, the Amazon Store has a de-facto monopoly position, preventing them from obtaining the content elsewhere.

And in practice, how is such filtering done?

I would imagine the Bible would be among the filtered books, since in it one can find a wide range of objectionable scenes, from torture and murder, to incest and infanticide.

It's just an idiotic idea, and in addition to the bad publicity, I can someone the implementation in court.

[GlennD]

I think filtering in general is a totally different subject than the perception that a particular minority was specifically targetted by Amazon's scripts....but that dead horse is well and truly flogged.

I'm pretty sure Amazon DOES do quite a bit of filtering, and you probably appreciate the results. One example I can think of (and I have no information to substantiate that this is happening) would be romances. They're a high-volume, low profit item for a bookstore. Do you really want to browse the top 100 sellers and sift through 20 or 30 Harlequins? You might want to, but Amazon doesn't really want you to....if you're looking for romances you're going to find them. They don't need to put them on the front page to attract sales. There's a reason that most best seller lists only include hardbacks - they're filtering the results that they present to you and that's been going on for years, way before Amazon came on the scene.

I'd be interested in seeing what a completely unfiltered search at Amazon would be like - I'd bet we'd all be surprised at the results.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by GlennD

... I'm pretty sure Amazon DOES do quite a bit of filtering, and you probably appreciate the results. ... Do you really want to browse the top 100 sellers and sift through 20 or 30 Harlequins?...

I am not sure how this makes sense.

The "top 100 sellers" are the top 100 sellers. Period. Not the 100 books Amazon has selected out of the top 327 sellers.

People who can read can usually apply more or less the appropriate terms when they search. Tampering with results, without the user being aware of it, would constitute deceptive practices.

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by Sonist

I am not sure how this makes sense.

The "top 100 sellers" are the top 100 sellers. Period. Not the 100 books Amazon has selected out of the top 327 sellers.

People who can read can usually apply more or less the appropriate terms when they search. Tampering with results, without the user being aware of it, would constitute deceptive practices.

Agreed 100%

I will add that if anyone uses "top 100 selling" as a buying/searching criterion, that person truly deserves all the dreck he/she will get

[frikk]

Hey guys,
Just wanted to follow up on this. Amazon's review system is un-moderated.

http://pastebin.ca/1390576

Not sure if this is a troll, or not, but its posted anonymously and makes a lot of sense. Especially since Amazon has not made an official stance on it, only that they are 'investigating a possible glitch'.

In case it goes down:

Oh hey Owen Thomas! How you doin?

Hay dude. Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code".

I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like "looking to get tarred and pleasured" and "Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence's lexical subject" kept getting flagged. The audacity of the San Francisco gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for "pnp" or "tina" reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. So I decided to get them back, and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.

I'm logged into Amazon at the time and see it has a "report as inappropriate" feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.

So I script some quick bash.
#!/bin/bash
let count = 1
while true; do
links -dump 'http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=0/?ie=ASCII&rs=1000&keywords=Gay_and_Lesbian&rh=n%3A !1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHomosexuality&page='` echo $count`|grep \/dp\/ >> /tmp/amazon
((count++))
done

There's some quick code to grab all the Gay and Lesbian metadata-tagged books on amazon. Then I pull out all the IDs of the given books from those URLs:

cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//

and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.

Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called "Cross-site request forgery'. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. If you ever need a service like that, you can find them in a post like this advertising in the comments:
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/so...chas-for-cash/

Then they would log into the accounts, save the cookies in a cookie file and send it to me.

Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books:

for i in `cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//`; do lynx -cookie_file=/home/avex/cookie1 http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/`echo $i`/;done

The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay
and outrage across the blogosphere
ain't so bad.

The only person to figure it out was dely from Six Apart: http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html
but he has been ground zero at my work, cleaning up my messes before.

So just letting you know the chain of events. if you choose to report on this, please don't disclose my identity/email address. Thanks!

I want to clarify: this may not be true - but it does add an interesting perspective.

[Sonist]

"...I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse...."

Hm, it sounds like a bit too much dedication for this to be true. Unless he was financed by the LDS Church or some other wacky "good works" group....

[nekokami]

Unlikely to be true -- sounds like a hoax-credit after the fact to me (particularly the part about hiring third-worlders and getting cookies that way-- could be done, but why bother?). And it does not change the basic premise people are objecting to, which is that Amazon suddenly started filtering "adult" books to keep them from showing in top sales lists, with the knock-on effect that they can't be found by searching from the main page, won't show up in "customers who bought what you bought also bought..." etc. Any filtering like that should be an option. (This also doesn't explain how anthropology and health books got delisted.)

[tirsales]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Unlikely to be true

especially because neither code nor links are correct

[GlennD]

This is probably as close as we'll ever see to a real explanation.

Note that 'adult' material has been flagged all along; it wasn't some sudden new decision.

"It's no big policy change, just some field that's been around forever filled out incorrectly," the source said."

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by GlennD

...
Note that 'adult' material has been flagged all along; it wasn't some sudden new decision.

Actually, I was NOT aware that adult material was hidden from my searches.

I doubt most users were aware of this, either.

Makes me wonder what else has been hidden from my searches.

I hope there is a hungry attorney out there, who can make a class action case out of this.

[deety]

Meh, I don't have a problem with adult content being filtered, as long as the things they consider adult are porn and sex toys rather than books that are about or written by gay people.

It seems a little obvious that they'd filter to some extent, which is why we're able to do seemingly simple things like search for movies without having the results full of the porn knockoff versions of popular titles.

[balok]

Originally Posted by Sonist

I would imagine the Bible would be among the filtered books, since in it one can find a wide range of objectionable scenes, from torture and murder, to incest and infanticide.

I object to using the bible as an example of "objectionable" material in support of liberalising censorship rules. Firstly, anyone who has actually read the bible will note that scenes of murder, incest and infanticide are very infrequent considering the sheer volume of literature included (in the case of "torture," I have never noticed any such scenes). Secondly, these "scenes" are actually brief accounts of regrettable events with little or no description. It would be simply unfair to qualify the bible as a violent book.

In sum, if you must use the bible as an example of questionable material, you must include all historical documents describing past crimes, wars and other atrocities. Clearly, that is not the purpose of censorship.

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by balok

Firstly, anyone who has actually read the bible will note that scenes of murder, incest and infanticide are very infrequent considering the sheer volume of literature included (in the case of "torture," I have never noticed any such scenes). Secondly, these "scenes" are actually brief accounts of regrettable events with little or no description. It would be simply unfair to qualify the bible as a violent book.

Clearly, that is not the purpose of censorship.

How exactly is it "clear" what the "purpose" of censorship is?

Secondly, have a look at the story where the other 11 tribes first nearly wipe out the tribe of (benjamin?), and then "remember" that there should be 12 tribes, so they kidnap whole tribes of women to be "impregnated" by them. This story contains a fairly gruesome group rape, the cutting up of that woman to send out as "reminders", and then first near-genocide, and afterwards yet another episode of massive kidnapping. While the passages may be eloquently worded or not is a secondary (translation) issue, but they're definitely not "neutral accounts" in any meaningful sense of the word. (alternatively, look at what all the 'favored by god' second (jealous) sons do.)
These scenes are not at all infrequent, they're just usually skipped in "bible reading" sessions. (And yes, the stories might be meant as reminders to not do these things, but then how do you explain the ending?)
"Length" or "frequency" are not valid arguments against "judging" a book. Whether stories are presented as endorsed or not might be, but that's where the bible gets into major trouble.

Anyway, I'm not interested in starting a discussion on the relative merits of this piece of literature, but I don't appreciate it when people whitewash the bad stuff by saying "but hey, He died for us in the end".