I did an experiment last week. I picked one of the m/m romance novels (Scarlet and the White Wolf by Kirby Crow) that had had its ranking removed and followed the ‘If you like this book you might like these’ links (links generated by Amazon, not by me). Every one of the related books also were ‘deranked’.

Then, I picked a m/f romance novel that still had its ranking (I thnk it was a Danielle Steele one), then looked at its ‘If you liked this…’ links. Funny, all of those books still had their ranking.

Small sample, sure. Still looked fishy to me, even to this straight woman.

Rankings for Kirby’s books seem to be back up now, at least. :D

That’s something the crowd here doesn’t really want to look at or admit. For amazon, it’s ultimately not about “gay” but about “explicitly sexual”.

Why didn’t you hear about the other books? Because there is no networked, organized, angry lobby on Twitter instantly available for mass outrage in a category called “erotica books with nature photography that go over the edge into explicit”. But hey, call Flickr, maybe you can get a shitstorm going over there, too.

The least persuasive argument here is that “anti-gay books weren’t flagged”. But that’s because they aren’t sexually explicit. Let’s ask this question: does an anti-gay screed get a title GLBT in the first place? I doubt it, because what member of the GLBT constituency, going to that section of the bookstore to find their tribe and buy books, is going to want to have a nasty anti-gay book staring at them? The prudent bookstore would put that back in some other category like “sociology” or “health” or something.

It seems to me that those concerned about trying to screen out adult explicit content either consciously, with eyeballs, or automatically, with a set of tags like “GLBT” and “erotica” simply identified GLBT as a high-probability category for very explicit sexual material.

And in fact their action was legitimate because it *is* a category with a very high probability for sexually explicit material! There’s *nothing wrong* with that. It’s a free country. You can’t ban porn books anymore. You can’t ban even books with some graphic scenes in them. But if they re all in a group to in fact help customers find them better as a sales tactic and as a nod to identity, you can’t then later scream that they were “targeted” in a snafu like this.

If you are a business, you have the right to “front the merchandise”. Amazon.com is guilty only of “fronting the merchandise” away from sexually explicit material. They did this in a way that “ham-fistedly” hacked at swathes of material that wasn’t in fact sexually explicit or really deserving of the title “adult” but was only GLBT.

Again, the problem is a) a category called GLBT that in fact GLBT customers *want* b) a genre of literature that in fact contains a high degree of sexual material that in fact customers want, and that’s their right.

So to now bellow that amazon.com wishes, as part of an effort to push back explicit sexual content, to discriminate against gays, is to say that amazon deliberately decides to punish gays qua gays because they have literature that is too sexual. That’s false. The issue is that the literature isn’t gay, but sexual.

If you want to fight against amazon’s wish to front some merchandize and not others for the sake of what they believe to be the wishes of the general public, fight that fight, but you’ll find that amazon has likely done just that — catered to the wishes of the general public, as a business.

So, live by the sword, die by the sword. It is where identity politics can lead you — to more discrimination, accidently or on purpose.

>It’s hilarious that you can both claim that in fact this mistake did NOT hit only gay books and also hit many others in a large grab-bag of 57,310 books, but still go on haranguing about “discrimination”.

Actually, I’m extremely doubtful about this 57,310 number quoted by Amazon. The way I see it, there’s a huge discrepancy between what was noticed by the #amazonfail crowd and what was claimed by Amazon. And I agree that it’s hilarious that Amazon could claim that there’s actually no discrepancy at all. What are these books that are categorized in Health and Mind/Body and Reproductive Technology that were deranked? Why didn’t we hear about it before? Why aren’t we hearing about it now? So ONE side of me says, the strong LGBT focus of the deranking observed over the weekend was in fact accurate, and Amazon’s claim is stretching the truth.

But the OTHER side of me says, let’s say Amazon was being honest, and there wasn’t any particularly strong LGBT focus, and that nobody noticed that all those other non-LGBT books were also deranked. In that case, we’re faced with something that you describe as follows:

>They flipped THE switch to categorize books in a VARIETY of categories as “adult”. One of those categories was GLBT. Anothe was “erotica”. Yet another was reproductive health or whatever.

Was it ONE switch which inappropriately flagged a VARIETY of categories of books as “adult”? This is what Amazon is claiming–not me, I repeat. Or were EACH of these categories (sexuality and disability, for example) individually and inappropriately flagged. If there is such a switch, can you tell me what it looks like?

And again, I apologize for my offensive tone. Debate is always healthy.

You’re not getting the point.

The GLBT books are ALREADY categorized as GLBT in their system.

They flipped the switch to categorize books in a variety of categories as “adult”. One of those categories was GLBT. Anothe was “erotica”. Yet another was reproductive health or whatever. And so all those separate categories got another metalayer of data called “adult” that deprecated them from the search tag.

The problem is that not all GLBT is adult — but by blanketing that category with the “adult” tag on top of the GLBT tag they buried it. Same for erotica. But anti-gay books wouldn’t be hit because they didn’t fall into a category selected for adult to be added.

Thus, sure, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of categories, but because GLBT *as a categor of its own* was flagged, it was disproportionate.

That’s my understanding, and if I’m wrong, shoot me, but it sure sounds like that’s how it works from everything they have said on the record.

Of course, we are not peering right at the code and seeing whether it says “if GLBT AND sexual term in title MARK adult” or how it works.

It’s hilarious that you can both claim that in fact this mistake did NOT hit only gay books and also hit many others in a large grab-bag of 57,310 books, but still go on haranguing about “discrimination”.

You’ve also simply not understood what I wrote so I will say it again:

What “PR consequences” is Amazon supposed to face for a) having marked all books about GLBT as “gay” in their system as a category when b) mistakes happen if adult is misapplied to this pre-existing category?

You can’t dispute the books are marked as GLBT — they are! And they added adult to the entire batch.

It’s quite possible that not ALL GLBT books got flagged (surely there’d be more than 57,000 juts of them) but those that had “if GLBT AND erotica AND term in title” or something like that. We don’t have the algorithm to see how it works!

And again, my point is that the pre-existing identity category of GLBT is what set this up. If GLBT books weren’t in a ghetto, and were mainstreamed, it would be harder for so many GLBT books to get targeted in a mistake like this.

This is EXACTLY what Amazon said that they DIDN’T do. I quote from the pseudo-official statement: “It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica.”

Perhaps you should better familiarize yourself with the facts of the issue before issuing these long rants.

No no no. She’s saying that the algorithm was constructed in such a way that it was able to erroneously flag a gay stripper memoir, but not a straight stripper memoir. It flagged gay children’s books. It flagged academic books about LGBT issues which only the truly depraved could consider erotically stimulating. It flagged books about sexuality and people with disabilities. And it didn’t flag books which think that gay people shouldn’t exist. The way the algorithm was constructed was biased towards judging books which assumed that gay people and other groups exist are more likely to contain sexual content–which is disturbing, but perhaps understandable, because that’s how society is biased.

>But algorithms are also imperfect. I agree there is a difference between “sexual orientation” and “sexual chocolate,” but I defy you to build an algorithm that can differentiate it.

Agreed. Nevertheless, hasn’t it been done before with Google SafeSearch, NetNanny, whatever? Which, granted, aren’t perfect (all of wikipedia being banned in the UK for a day was a major fail), but this doesn’t seem to have been a particular problem for them.

Then they could say, “We see that there are some challenges in how our algorithms are categorizing books. For now, we will restore previous settings and develop a plan to address this.”

Finally, the could say, “We have investigated the matter and have found out the following and here’s what we’re doing about it.”

The lack of clear communication on this issue by Amazon is compounding the problem. Regrettable that they don’t appear to have (mini) crisis management in place, or at least a proactive PR department. Their customers and their authors deserve better.

It seems to me that what’s happened is this. A decision was made to strip all books in the erotica subcategories of sales ranks. The process by which this was done was also applied to the LBGT subcategories. The relevant question therefore is how did that second event come about and was it the result of a conscious deliberate management decision? Personally I doubt Amazon would deliberately do something that stupid, so I’d guess human error in applying policy sent down from above.

The key claim “…underlying assumptions that drove their classification and algorithm system to be built to filter “gay” into “adult”” just doesn’t stand up.

The cause is never served by falsehoods. Indeed, the argumentation that the religious right often makes in the YouTubes and the blogs is that if you grant gay rights, you will lose your own civil rights and freedom of choice. So they shouldn’t be given quarter there, and it should never seem that fighting for gay rights involves hysterical persecution of people perceived to somehow slight gays — when in fact they did not, and it is false to charge them in that manner.

You keep saying this: “there THEN appeared there was.” But, there wasn’t.

As much as I support gay rights, I refuse to turn #amazonfail, even in the “morning after the morning after quarterbacking” into a gay right issue. It isn’t one. In fact, the infantile and whiney and entitlement-happy behaviour of so many in the Twitter mob over this, screeching and demanding amazon’s head, was just wrong, wrong, wrong, and only feeds into the stereotypes about what gay rights are. They should always be about equality and mainstreaming, and not about special privileges and suppressing others’ rights.

As much as he is wrong about many other things, Clay Shirky impressed me by being able to accurately analyze and critique is very own mob behaviour on this in giving in to the seduction of mass self-righteousness. He is spot on:

http://www.shir...-of-amazonfail/

Trust me, many of those (including me) that were worried by what happened DO work directly on gay marriage rights.

I am not repeating that there was deliberate discrimination. I’m saying that though it now appears there wasn’t, there THEN appeared there was. To say that people should just get over it once again minimizes the effect of these attitudes.

I’m not sure where I said anyone was entitled to compensation. In fact, I’m sure I didn’t. I think I maybe suggested cutting people a little slack, taking a minute to realize the reason (not excuse, but reason) for the freak-out. Then I gave reasons for that suggestion, not to suggest that anyone was entitled to pain, but that it might have been an unfortunate side-effect of a mistake that, despite being unintentional, still had consequences — just like mistakes (mostly unintentional, really) tend to do.

In fact, my point really was that yes, there are fellow Americans that need persuading. I suppose since I’m talking about it here instead of elsewhere it might seem like I’m banging on Amazon or specially on the issue with Amazon, but my point was more that this might be an opportune time to analyze assumptions both pre- and post-deluge.

Geez. Who’s spasming?

If you want to work on gay marriage rights, work on that directly, don’t have an infantile placebo spasm banging on a corporation to get attention.

Work on persuading your fellow Americans who need persuading. amazon.com is not the problem.

You keep repeating over and over that there *was* discrimination deliberately and therefore you are “entitled” to some kind of hurt, and some kind of compensation.

But there wasn’t any deliberate discrimination. So you are not entitled to anything.

There is no evidence that there were any deliberate algorithms to deliberately flag gays as adult inappropriately. So why are you continuing to bang on this? Why is anybody?