Earlier Monday I passed along the info that Amazon.com had removed the sales rankings of books in their massive catalog of GLBT subject matter because they were reclassified as “adult” thereby making those books not show up in searches on the subject on their site. In the wake of customer outrage and inquires to Amazon about this new policy, the company responded that the matter was caused by a “glitch” in the system and that the company planned to fix the problem soon. A few hours ago, Pink reader Darcy pointed me to THIS blogpost by a hacker named VEEW who claimed responsibility for the “glitch” which I discounted at first … but the tech blog Gizmodo seems to think that the hacker’s claims may be a valid explanation. Could Amazon’s site merely have been purposely hacked and that was what caused all of this uproar?

Okay, maybe Amazon is off the hook. The well-known troll Weev is claiming that he’s actually responsible for Amazon’s sudden surge of LGBT prudishness. Which Valleywag says actually makes sense. It’s startingly simple: It doesn’t take very many votes at all to get a product flagged as “inappropriate” and booted off the rankings. He says he created a script that generated a list of product IDs for every gay and lesbian book on Amazon. From there, he just needed a whole bunch of people to flag the books as inappropriate, which wasn’t hard, because simply getting someone to go the URL of a successful flag would count as another one. Using an invisible iframe on popular websites owned by friends and a group of “third-worlders” he hired to register accounts, he generated enough votes to de-list gay and lesbian books en masse. Lending credence to his claims, Valleywag notes that the “flag as inappropriate” feature is currently disabled. Free reign for inappropriate books

If this hacker’s claim is true, then why didn’t Amazon say so in the first place? There are reports that this “new practice” started back in February so why didn’t Amazon detected the hack back then? This hacker’s claim also does not explain why author Mark Probst got an email from Amazon two days ago that his book (a gay western story that features no sexual content at all) had been reclassified as “adult”. On the other hand, if the hacker was smart enough to change the way the Amazon system classified books, the company might not have been aware of the change and automated systems may have just assumed the changes were valid. Trust me, I really want to believe that Amazon is not at fault here but they have THUS FAR been painfully quiet on this whole matter. I am still hoping to hear something from them that concretely explains what the hell is going on … whether it is their fault or not, we need to know that truth. I need to know the truth if I am going to remain one of their customers.

UPDATE: Amazon is now publicly denying that any hacker infiltrated their system and caused the “glitch” that removed the sales ranks from their catalog of GLBT books. In fact, Amazon clarifies that not only GLBT books where stripped of their sales rankings but “57,310 books in a number of broad categories” were effected by an error that they describe as “ham-fisted”. In an email response from Amazon.com that I received Monday evening (after I emailed them my outrage at this development), the company clearly accepted fault and blame for the error — yet they offered no apology. Here is the full text of the email that I received from Amazon.com today:

Hello,

Customer Service Department
Amazon.com

To say that this relieves me EXPONENTIALLY is an understatement. As I’ve said before, I am a huge fan of Amazon.com and I was totally dismayed by this apparent error. If anything, I’m happy to know that the Internet community was able to seemingly drag the problem into the public consciousness and get the problem “fixed” in a very quick manner. Still, I think that there needs to be a full accounting of what actually happened and what safeguards will be put in place in ensure it never happens again … but I will rest my head happily tonight more confident that this act was an error and that steps are being taken to remedy the problem as soon as possible.

[Source, Source, thanks Darcy]

Over the weekend a firestorm of outrage began to swirl on the Internets (and particularly on Twitter, I first heard about this from author Neil Gaiman) over the new policy by Amazon.com to remove sales rankings of books that the site deemed “adult” … but which really stripped books that deal with gay, lesbian or transgendered characters and/or themes of their book rankings (leaving heterosexual erotica untouched and with their sales rankings in tact). This is particularly important because book rankings help books show up in product searches which translates into the sale of more of those books. Since the subject erupted over the weekend, Amazon.com has issued a statement saying that the matter was caused by a “glitch” that removed the book rankings from all of the GLBT books and that the issue would be remedied immediately. The thing that concerns me the most is that this practice was first noticed back in February and the glitch was only discovered once the general buying public started to catch wind of the practice (over Easter weekend, no less). Here is a short synopsis of what’s been going on as uncovered by book bloggers and the response issued by Amazon.com in the wake of this controversy:

1. Craig Seymour first complained about his book being adversely treated by Amazon back in February.

It’s not because customers put any stock into the Amazon Ranking number. It’s that the Amazon Rank affects a books’ visibility on the bestseller list, on the “If you Like ___, you might like __ feature” and so forth. It is akin to the bookstore removing the books from the shelves and requiring you to go to the Customer Service desk and ask for the book or author specifically. Visibility is a huge factor in sales and anyone who doesn’t believe that is kidding themselves.

Here is the response to all of this controversy that has been issued by Amazon.com:

A “glitch” on Amazon.com has caused the sales rank to be removed from gay- and/or lesbian-themed books by James Baldwin, Gore Vidal and others. “There was a glitch in our systems and it’s being fixed,” Amazon’s director of corporate communications, Patty Smith, said in an e-mail Sunday. As of Sunday night, books without rankings included Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.” The removals prompted furious remarks on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere online. Craig Seymour, author of the gay memoir “All I Could Bare,” wrote on his blog Sunday that his sales rank was dropped in February, then restored nearly four weeks later, after he was told by Amazon that his book had been “classified as an Adult product.”

I must admit that I am deeply concerned by this action on Amazon’s part. It seems very fishy to me that a glitch caused all of this selective censorship. What seems more likely is that the company prolly tried to get away with this new endeavor and didn’t consider the fact that anyone would notice. I am very troubled that a company that I give much business to would try to pull something like this in the first place. The Kindle e-book reader (which I love) works exclusively with Amazon’s book inventory. And while I try to shop at as many independent bookshops as I can when buying books in person, the ease of shopping at Amazon is very attractive. Of course I want to believe that the company actually suffered a malfunction that caused this error — after all, nothing in my experience with Amazon.com before has even hinted at this sort of business practice. At this point … I’m not sure what to do. I plan to watch this issue closely and follow the action that Amazon takes in the coming days and weeks. Not only does the company owe its customers a COMPLETE REVERSAL of this nonsense immediately but they also owe a huge public apology and perhaps some sort of reparation to the GLBT authors that were harmed by this action.

The Dear Author blog has published some helpful information for those of you who wish to contact Amazon directly to voice your displeasure:

Amazon executive customer service email is: ecr@amazon.com and the customer service phone number is 1-800-201-7575. I’ve called and sent emails. (I even called the cell phone of an Amazon PR person). There is also a petition. The louder the noise you can make collectively, the more likely action will be taken. You can use Robin’s template:

This is nothing short of discrimination; this is nothing short of censorship. This is nothing a business that claims commercial integrity at even the most basic level would do. Consequently, as a longtime Amazon customer, I look forward to an immediate reversal of this ridiculous policy. Otherwise, I will purchase elsewhere and encourage everyone else I know to do the same.

I suspect if Amazon realizes how many people their glitch has offended they might be more quick to come back and do the right thing.

[Source, Source]