Last night I wrote a post about Amazon.com's alleged snub of the LGBT community (of which I am a member). I suggested that calls of boycott against Amazon were premature as Amazon had up until now been a very gay-friendly company and perhaps this really was a glitch.
Well, tonight news is breaking of a blogger who is claiming responsibility for getting the LGBT books delisted from Amazon. Apparently the blogger (with possibly the help of his friends) registered hundreds of accounts on Amazon and then flagged LGBT books as "inappropriate" using Amazon's reporting tool. Since different accounts were reporting books as inappropriate rather that just one account, it didn't set off any alarms in Amazon's systems and allowed the hack attack to continue. If this is true, this makes Amazon's claim of a "glitch" causing the problem completely plausible.
While I feel that Amazon should have had a better review process in place before delisting the books, it goes to show that Amazon did not purposely slight the gay community.
Meanwhile, an Amazon employee is giving a behind-the-scenes account of what happened. It doesn't necessarily coincide with the blogger's claim, but it also makes the case for what happened being unintentional. Keep in mind that Amazon wouldn't necessarily want to admit a hack attack. It would shake their image of being a secure place online to shop. They would probably rather claim an internal process error than reveal a successful attack to the public.
Whatever the real reason, Amazon has assured the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation that they will fix the problem according to a statement issued by Neil Giuliano, President of GLADD.
I have updated my last post with the latest developments, but felt I should write this post since many people might not see the updates.
Furthermore I'm asking that if you were one of the people who spread the word about the Amazon story (regardless of whether you called for the boycott), I'm hoping you'll also spread the word about these latest developments as well. Many of you said in the comments of my last post that you have other reasons for disliking Amazon. Fair enough, but I think we owe it to Amazon to help get the truth out there about this situation.
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Kevin Lee
SpiritManSF
Arizona Viking
Eric Hudson
kipouros
"Hello," she lied
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Comments
The fact that Amazon has not addressed the issue online and in a direct way speaks to some serious corporate idiocy.
Kelley Eskridge of Humans at Work, writes: "Amazon has handled this communications crisis in the worst possible way, which is to ignore the outrage and throw corporate-speak at the issue. I was aware of the controversy early Sunday morning: there was no response from Amazon until late afternoon, and the company spoke through a press release to the Associated Press. Amazon is an online business, suffering an online publicity massacre, and they offered no online response of substance. No blog post of their own. No direct dialogue attempts on Twitter. Imagine that you're on an arena stage in front of tens of thousands of angry people, and instead of speaking into the microphone, you get on your cell phone and call someone to take a memo to send those folks. That's essentially how Amazon handled it."
Anyway, I hope Amazon is proof of this, that they did not cynically make politically motivated content choices and that they did not engage in such discrimination. Let's also hope this fraudster who attacked their system is soon forgotten and his hostility cast aside by a population of bigger people.
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2009/04/14/why-amazons-explanation-is-none-at-all/