That theory seems entirely possible.  I even know someone who would do this.  She spends hours on line writing religious rants against gays and lesbians and anything / anyone remotely pro-choice.  And she has an Amazon account where she bashes any book with a liberal slant (and every book on her wish list is about Nazis - I don’t like to think about that).  A few nut jobs like her could cause a lot of trouble in they had enough time on their hands and/or enough commitment to the cause.

I searched for “Changing Bodies, Changing Lives” and it not only brought up the correct book and the rest of the stuff from the “Our bodies ourselves” collective, it suggested the title that you put at the top of this post.

So maybe they are listening?

My friend in New York (who is gay) put this up on his Facebook page earlier today and now it totally exploded, (insert deity here) bless blogs.

Fuck Amazon. I just cancelled and order (redirected to Powell’s) and sent them a blistering message about my unwillingness to do business with them ever again unless they shitcan this nonsense IMMEDIATELY. As I said to them, I do not do business with self-appointed censors. And I don’t give a fuck who’s pressuring them, that’s no excuse.

It is a shame that Amazon will now have to spend time putting such books, movies, etc. in a special category so nutjobs can’t do this again.

I remember the bad shit that happens when racist crazy people were linking Obama’s books to something offensive, so clearly if have enough hate and time, they will do whatever they can do.

Dang it, hit blaspheme too soon. I have no real theory on this, I don’t know how right wing groups would be able to influence what Amazon determines as “adult”, it is like on Youtube where users alert the moderators to things they believe are adult and then it’s tagged as such? Cause if so, man, the fundies mobilized quick and hard on this one.

They’re aware that they have a PR disaster on their hands.  They’ve said it was a glitch, which fits my theory that they’ve been hacked.

They’re aware that they have a PR disaster on their hands.  They’ve said it was a glitch, which fits my theory that they’ve been hacked.

With respect, you’re missing the point. Their software should not include ANY possible facility for this to happen. They have no business making it possible to rig search results in any way whatsoever. People who are “offended” by what a proper search engine turns up can kiss my royal Irish arse.

So it may be a bantown gambit.  STF what.  Amazon should have their systems set up to shut down this kind of automated bullshit because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how an automated system can be used to brew a shitstorm.

That isn’t “being hacked”.  This means they have gotten lazy about their automated systems and nobody is checking on their activity on a regular basis like they should be!

Well, I am both a longtime reviewer (with a Vine account) and a customer. I’m going to wait to see how they deal with this before I order anything again though.

It’s sensible to suspend or cancel purchases for the time being, but let’s not go off half-cocked—we don’t want this to turn into a “slave ship on the Snapple bottle” situation.

BrianX, I’m giving them a chance to apologize and explain what steps they have taken to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. ONE chance. TOMORROW. That’s all they get from me. And I have spent quite a bit of money there over the years.

To clarify what the deranking does, for most of these books, it will not change anything if a person searches by author or title.  You’ll still find the book.

But the thing is, that’s not how a lot of people search for books on a given subject, since many will not know what is available.  I know that when I want, say, a book on cooking with eggplant, I probably won’t know there’s a given cookbook on it unless I read a review somewhere.  Instead, I’m going to go look at what’s listed under cookbooks or vegetarian cookbooks, etc.

What the deranking does is remove a book from being listed by subject, or by it’s sales status, both two MAJOR factors in a book being found on Amazon by someone who does not know what it is called, who wrote it, or that it exists.

Additionally, removing books like mine, say, from the teen sexuality section, means what is left on that list is a whole lot of anti-teen sexuality books or books that aren’t relevant at all, meaning the young person looking for an accurate book about their sexuality is going to have a very tough time finding it.

Cause if so, man, the fundies mobilized quick and hard on this one.

And on Easter, too.  Aren’t they supposed to be occupied with celebrating the joyous resurrection of their lord and savior?  Aren’t they supposed to be in church all day hanging on every word out of their pastors’ mouths?

Heather, that’s why I searched on a different book in the same genre, and it immediately recommended your book.  They seem to have reverted the system in some way.

I also searched for “gay teen” and “rape” and got books that were supposedly delisted. 

That doesn’t mean that it was acceptable that Amazon left open an exploit to allow this to happen.  My husband works with systems that generate recommendations and it seems like they trusted their automated systems far too much without human eyeballs or automated alerts when activity suddenly changed.

it’s a good thing that amazon is motivated by profit to sell books and that capitalism is here to protect us from censorship

I’ve got a roomful of computer peeps right now, and theories are that they programmed it funky, or a disgruntled employee did it.

Thing is, they may need human beings to monitor bantown stuff, because some things need human intelligence to be understood.  But it’s Easter, so….

I’m guessing everyone was yanked into work for an emergency meeting tonight, despite the holiday.

for most of these books, it will not change anything if a person searches by author or title.  You’ll still find the book.

This doesn’t seem to be entirely true, as quite a few word-for-word searches for de-listed books don’t seem to be turning up the books in question.  Said searches do, however, seem to turn up other books with connection to the searched-for book (for instance other books with connections to Jessica Valenti come up via a FFF search), however I’ve done some digging and not found any link to the (apparently) flagged books in question. 

Author searches seem to be a mixed bag—a search for Jessica Valenti does not turn up Full Frontal Feminism on the first page, but it does turn up Yes Means Yes (another de-listed title) at result #14.

It’s also worth noting that Amazon has purged my entire recommendation list of any women’s studies titles.

Yes, but if you went to the full subject listings on Amazon that usually include my book, or FFF or Yes Means Yes, you’d see we have been wiped from those listings (not user-generated searches by topic).  Too, us being removed from the sales ranks then makes it appear that other books—not on topic, etc.—are more popular, which is hella deceptive. 

Not saying you find any of it acceptable, just trying to make clear that there are serious downsides for authors and consumers because of this, and that’s beyond the most basic issue of this happening around a group of books that are, in some way, already about or involving marginalized people/issues.

So, again just to be clear, not delisted, deranked.  Absolutely, being delisted or wiped full-stop would be way worse, but this ain’t good either.  Particular;y given what the criteria appears to be.

(Sorry to be unclear, my last reply was to Ms Kate)

Now I hate myself for doing the lazy thing on the “Easter” thread and linking to the Amazon listing of Inanna. For some time now I’ve wondered at the wisdom of citing a book by any online sales listing and 99 percent of the time, people (including me) default to the Amazon listing.

Sometimes I resist this by finding a review online that isn’t, as far as I can see, linked to any sales operation; henceforth I will do this or if necessary find a library citation, rather that give any business free advertising that also tends to legitimate them as an institution.

Kind of funny Amazon didn’t already delist Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth; not only is it literally pagan, the Amazon keywords include terms like “wondrous vulva.”

Perhaps it is delisted and I just found it because I went direct to its title via Google?

“Quiet, Inanna; the ways of the underworld are perfect. Do not question them.”

It is clear that it involves clusters of marginalized folks, as Opoponax notes with the removal of Woman’s Studies titles as well.

I suspect that somebody exploited the automated system to produce the deranking.  Either that, or somebody linked a data table with a set of titles or even genres to shitlist to the deranking system, and did it within the system.  Maybe somebody from the Seattle Hate Church (Mars Hill) works at Amazon?

I made a few changes for clarity to the post.

Well, all I can say is that I didn’t need those plastic Spanish-style playing cards that badly. But this is a new stuff week for Vine coming up, and I’m going to be watching what they do before I go and post another review for them. (I also don’t need a free cookbook that badly, though the idea of soaking them for shipping costs is a rather amusing one.)

Their software should not include ANY possible facility for this to happen. They have no business making it possible to rig search results in any way whatsoever.

Easier said than done. Ever tried to design something that covers every possible contingency? It’s not possible. I’m not saying that Amazon is blameless here, just that you’re asking for the impossible in this case.

Incertus:

Very good point. Ironically, the censor-happy folk of the world are some of the ones who least understand this—that’s why DRM systems tend to fail. When it comes to computers, it’s often harder to rein in certain features than it is to implement them in the first place. There’s always an exploit, and many features (like the Amazon ranking system, for example) can’t be removed without sacrificing a major aspect of the functionality.

Easier said than done.

Nonsense. Just have a clean search engine with no bullshit about removing “adult” or “offensive” material, and honest unmanipulated sales ranks like B&N;‘s. Easy as pie, much easier than what they have now.

Ah dammit.

It’s not like I’m all for the Mega-Lo-Mart of the Internet to be perfect, but Amazon was damn convenient. I would be embarrassed to guess how much $$ I’ve sent them over the years, and I rather liked their MP3 Download service.

I’ll be watching this very carefully over the next few days. I certainly won’t be purchasing anything more from them until this clears up, and how they respond to this is going to determine if I ever purchase anything from them ever again.

Re Amanda’s latest update: only if the “mistake” is defined as having ANY system for removing books from search results and sales ranks, based on content, “complaints” or whatever, in the first place. And it’s a mistake they’d better rectify pronto.

Just have a clean search engine with no bullshit about removing “adult” or “offensive” material, and honest unmanipulated sales ranks like B&N;’s. Easy as pie, much easier than what they have now.

Dude, if you really think B&N;‘s system is “clean,” I’ve got a great deal on some land down here in Florida for you, just west of Weston and just east of Naples. No system is clean, and no system is unexploitable. The best you can ever hope for is that when your system fails, which it inevitably will, that it fails well. Amazon’s didn’t. Here’s hoping they learn from it. Note that system here can apply either to their search engine or to the people at the top making the decisions.

I suspect that they will.  The lesson here is that attempts to make the internet “family-friendly” are bound to fail, at least in any system that receives so much input and adjustments from the public at large.  It’s stupid to have any kind of adult monitoring—-children have no reason to be on Amazon, and adults should own the responsibility to look away if they see something they don’t like.

I sent them an e-mail tonight, and I’m expecting that mine is one of hundreds of thousands they’ll be receiving on the issue.

I expect that they’ll make some major changes over the next couple days and will start a serious clean up campaign of the shitstorm this created.

At least, I certainly hope they do because I just got a Kindle, and I really don’t want to send it back. But if they don’t fix this, I will.

Steve:

You sound like someone who’s looking for justification to nail them to the wall, rather than to see how it will play out. Please, put the torches and pitchforks down and see how it plays out.

It is clear that it involves clusters of marginalized folks, as Opoponax notes with the removal of Woman’s Studies titles as well.

To clarify, Ms Kate, they haven’t removed all women’s studies titles from their rankings.  Even a search for specifically pulled titles will get you other works under the women’s studies subject, and if you dig hard enough within the remaining listings you can find more (though it’s interesting that the same 5-10 books keep coming up, which leads me to believe that the field of ranked women’s studies titles has been significantly altered). 

What has been removed is the women’s studies entries in my recommendations list.  There isn’t even a “women’s studies” tag anymore, and clicking clustered tags like “social sciences” and “history and criticism” which often include women’s studies turns up nothing related to that field.  In response to this I dug around for some WS titles I own which are still listed and rated them, hoping to make an impact in my recommendations.  They have just now as I write this started to reappear (nothing on the first page, though—they are apparently much more interested in the fact that I downloaded a free SXSW sampler album a few weeks ago).

#amazonfail has generated like a dozen Twitter followers of my feed.  Heh.

BrianX, I am responding to the objective fact of what happened. I don’t care what was behind it, it needs to never happen again and they need to explain what steps they’ve taken to insure that it won’t.

Incertus, from what I’ve been able to determine any book that has actually sold copies recently gets a sales rank on B&N;. What’s so hard about doing that? What’s so exploitable about it without actually hacking into their site?

Interesting idea: maybe we should fight back by going to amazon and stroking some of our favorite women’s studies/LGBT/sexuality titles?  Take this opportunity to give some pageclicks, write some reviews, or even just rate stuff.  I wonder what that would do?  Obviously it’s not going to bring back anything that’s already been censored, but might it send a message that we fucking CARE about having access to this stuff? That these books are important?

Let’s just say that if this happens at B&N;, it will seriously fuck up my family life for a couple of weeks, and I’ll just have to hunt down and strangle somebody.

Craig Seymour says this isn’t new. It doesn’t remove the possibility that this is still an exploit of a weakness, but it does make Amazon a bit more culpable.

But once again, the tagging facility that may have been exploted should not exist. Let them provide an opt-in “safe search” if they feel they must, but not this nonsense.

Strange, I’m still seeing books about evolution, global warming, and other wingnut-unfriendly topics…

Steve LaBonne:

Re Amanda’s latest update: only if the “mistake” is defined as having ANY system for removing books from search results and sales ranks, based on content, “complaints” or whatever, in the first place. And it’s a mistake they’d better rectify pronto.

I know it was discussed on Feministing, but possibly also here. A few months back, feminist bloggers were up in arms (and rightly so in my opinion) about a game that included raping women for points being sold not even directly on Amazon, but through its seller network, like eBay. How could there not be some kind of user complaint system? I would be in favor of it being human-monitored and not automatic, but somewhere someone has to make a decision about what is not fit to sell.

Agreed that the system shouldn’t exist.  But until this happened, it probably seemed reasonable to them to tag pornographic stuff so that they didn’t get complaints about it.  Here’s hoping they’ve learned their lesson—-anti-pornography censorship pretty much always gets enforced against people who are marginalized more than people whose pornographic material reinforces straight male privilege, and there’s no reason to think that Amazon wouldn’t, even if they didn’t want to, get swept up into that.  But I can see why they weren’t necessarily aware of these issues.  I wouldn’t have been if people like Susie Bright hadn’t been writing about it for years.

How could there not be some kind of user complaint system?

There should be a flagging system for user-created listings.  There should NOT be such a system for titles listed by Amazon itself (or through whatever professional channels are typically used).  Any flagging system should be heavily moderated by actual humans and used ONLY for the purpose of alerting Amazon management to material that violates mutually agreed-upon standards that users have access to.

I really feel sorry for their customer service people tonight.

Torches and pitchforks? Next how about mentioning a witch hunt?

This has been going on since February for some authors. I don’t buy it was just a glitch.

I found this post from Mark Probst to be somewhat illuminating.

I’m enjoying this strange new internet thing, I’m watching a shit storm hit a company in real time, and it’s kinda cool.

I note from the form letters getting passed around that the customer service people evidently didn’t really know what was going on.

Incertus, from what I’ve been able to determine any book that has actually sold copies recently gets a sales rank on B&N;. What’s so hard about doing that? What’s so exploitable about it without actually hacking into their site?

Wow, are you kidding?  Organizations buying books to pump up sales for a given author for whatever reason is an old stunt that predates the Web.  Scientologists did it with Hubbard’s fiction, and various conservative organizations have done it with books in the US (Regenry is the usual suspect publisher).

Still nothing on Amazon’s front page. One might think their PR department was caught utterly flatfooted.

I think, more than anything, that this de-ranking of books isn’t so much a quasi-fascist move by Amazon as much as it is a manipulation of the rating and tagging system on Amazon as has been mentioned on this thread.
I remember how in October that Obama Halloween masks were being tagged to lead viewers to find it in search results that included Satanism, terrorism, and other right-wing strawman blather.
Personally, I think it would be fun to use that system in returning the favor to those fearless keyboard warriors of the mega-church ilk by rating/tagging all of their idols/ranting points.  Like tagging Rush Limbaugh with all things ursine (though Arnold from Green Acres might object to that) or Ann Coulter with her role model Julius Streicher, for example.  Just a thought.

Wow, this is really true. You can’t bring up “Full Frontal Feminism” on Amazon.com even if you search for exactly that phrase. But, you can bring up pornographic movies really, really easily. Shit, this is disturbing. I’ve emailed Amazon, lets see what develops with this.

This all really depends upon your definition of a “glitch”. Here’s what probably happen: little Johnny was searching for some book and the search engine returned some gay erotica which caused his mother to become apoplectic. She then contacted her friend on one of the FOTF lists—or any other list which is used to generate 10’s of thousands of complaints about nipples appearing on television. This group contacted Amazon who not wanted to deal with the crazies decided they would de-rank the offending item and others. They gave the project to a db admin who wrote an update script, but didn’t test it first. S/he ran the update script which removed ratings from far more items than was envisioned.

So is it a glitch? The fact that Amazon would remove ANY ratings to hide a product from a general search seems to me to be succumbing to pressure to censor content. However given Amazon’s bizarre reactions to this event it does appear the removal went beyond what they had envisioned.

Organizations buying books to pump up sales for a given author for whatever reason is an old stunt that predates the Web.

I don’ care about pumping books up; not my problem. The important thing is that they can’t make other books disappear. This is not a difficult concept, and The Oppoponax got it exactly right:

There should be a flagging system for user-created listings.  There should NOT be such a system for titles listed by Amazon itself (or through whatever professional channels are typically used).

I would be more inclined to believe that it was a glitch if the first entry when I did a search on “homosexuality” hadn’t been a piece of shit called “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.”

I gave it one star.

Now, there’s the “Bantown” idea. It’s another possibility.

This site has some interesting clues as to the nature of the “glitch” which isn’t a glitch.

It will be veeerrrrryyyy interesting to see if and how Amazon responds to this. If it were B&N;, or another site that also had a brick-and-mortar component to their corporation, I could easily see the executives pish-poshing the “fringe elements online”—but since Amazon is 100% online, it will be educational to see how seriously they take the #amazonfail uproar.

Especially if this was manufactured by right-wing fundnut astroturfers, they’re going to piss off a bunch of people no matter how they respond. So who’s it going to be?

I don’t expect a full-page mea culpa on their frontpage, but some sort of acknowledgement of the fuckup would be nice.

It seems they have managed to reinstate one of the more high-profile (and probably most often cited in this story) titles: Brokeback Mountain.

Heather Has Two Mommies is still gone.

Giovanni’s Room is still gone.

The feminist titles we’ve been talking about here are still gone.

Homosexuality and Civilization shows up in the top 10 search results for “homosexuality” now (though the top 5 are all still ZOMG TEH GHEY OHNOES!!!) - I believe I saw that one in a list of the de-ranked last night. 

I have a bad feeling that their approach is to reinstate books individually, as they get to them, probably based on which titles are mentioned in MSM reports on the non-glitch.  And keep spouting the line that it was just a glitch.  No real apology, and no clarification of how their system works and what will be done to prevent this sort of thing in the future.

If I don’t see at least a small link to an apology on the amazon main page today, I am going to seriously consider closing my amazon account and no longer sending people that way (which is sad because I was just getting more into them lately due to mp3 downloads and looking into a kindle 2.0).  I don’t need a full-page sob-fest, but something more than silently reinstating some of the titles is required.

Correction - Full Frontal Feminism is back, under a search for “women’s studies”!

I have a lot of trouble understanding what the “Bantown” theory is.

Here’s a sample of “tehdaly” “explaining”:

That, my friends, is pure Bantown. What is Bantown? Some things Bantown is not:

  * A trolling organization
  * A group of people (at least since 2007)
  * An IRC channel

Bantown is a tactic for inciting meta-lulz on multiple levels through the alignment of third-parties against each other. Bantown is like the plot of most James Bond movies, wherein some nefarious evildoer brings the US and the Soviets close to war. Bantown is a trolling technique of the highest order, which usually pits communities against each other, or communities against companies, or organizations against companies, or companies against organizations… Lest I sound too starry-eyed, let me list a few successful Bantown trolls:

  * Nipplegate
  * Toorcon Firefox shitstorm. Here, google it.
  * LOLJ. Here, google it.
  * Strikethrough….

Now I suppose that if I jumped down some of the rabbit holes “tehdaly” indicates there I might come upon a somewhat less postmodern narrator who will actually clarify what “Bantown” is rather than this fan-dance.

But for Pete’s sake, if “Bantown,” whatever that may actually mean, is different enough from one of the other scenarios people have actually explained clearly to be worth considering separately—will someone who gets it please spell it out for my plodding linear mind?

GROUCHO MARX as RUFUS T. FIREFLY:—Understand this? Understand this?!? Why, a child of six could understand this!
(Flunky slinks away, embarrassed; FIREFLY signals to PRIVATE SECRETARY)
FIREFLY—Get me a child of six. I don’t understand this.

Mark, my reading is that “bantown” is an advanced approach to trolling. 

For instance, what’s being suggested here is that a group of trolls got together and decided to flag certain LGBT titles in hopes that something like this would occur and create the sort of shitstorm we saw last night.  They just enjoy getting people riled up.  But on a much larger level than coming into a comment thread here and spouting MRA talking points.

Nipplegate, for instance, was something that happened on LiveJournal where a user’s photo which featured a picture of a breastfeeding child was removed supposedly for being obscene (a case where, I believe, the sort of flagging procedure discussed in this thread was at the heart of the removal - it seemed like people were complaining about a user image that legitimately violated the terms of service).  Pro-breastfeeding groups were outraged.  I’m sure the fallout was hilarious if you are a trollish sort.

I agree with Ms Kate and with the “bantown” theory—most systems can be gamed or fooled with, especially on a holiday weekend when the operators aren’t paying attention.

What I don’t understand is how Amazon would allow an item to be de-ranked on a criteria like sales—one moment a book has sold X-thousand copies, the next some Xtian fantasist yahoo have been duped into voting for “no it didn’t,” and Amazon’s system accepts that filter. We’re stuck dealing with $cientologists and the like who juke the stats by spending hard cash to buy up the books, that’s their idiotic business.But if I’m looking up raw sales rank I want to see raw sales rank.

At the moment Amazon is calling this a “glitch”—quite an understatement. The Opopnax has the right idea: de-ranking and exclusion from general listings simply should not be based on user input (e.g. tags, reviews). It’ll take more than a couple of days to re-code the system to do this successfully, but if they’re doing it on an item-by-item basis they’re going along a very Sisephysean path.

I have a lot of trouble understanding what the “Bantown” theory is.

“Pardon me, but I speak 4chan…” (and to look at me, that would be as funny as June Cleaver speaking jive). I’ll try to clarify.

Basically, it boils down to a group of pranksters discovering a flaw in a given system (in this case, end-user input of certain terms can exclude items from Amazon’s rankings of things like sales charts). The pranksters then contact the kind of idiots who are obsessed with certain terms (here, homophobes and Xtian fantasists who tend to classify lots of innocuous stuff as “adult” or “pornographic”) with a “fantastic grassroots activism idea.” These sex-obsessed idiots, being just as connected (if not more so) than anyone else, start up their campaign while the pranksters sit back and laugh at the system operator (for leaving such a stupid hole in the system), their dupes (for taking this stuff so seriously) and those who are outraged and confused.

The pranksters time the stunt to occur at a point when the operators of the system aren’t paying attention to traffic spikes and similar anomalies (for many systems, this point is “all the time”). Also, the kind of pranksters in question, while not hardcore homophobes or racists themselves, usually include some juvenile reference to homosexuality, race or sex as part of their pranks, which re-enforces the “bantown” idea. If it was just hackers quietly testing a hole in the system, they likely would have done something more low-profile.

Mark,
As I understand it, Bantown is the internet version of “Let’s You and Him Fight,” where Shit-Stirrer goes to Guy A and says “Guy B says he can beat your ass while eating your girlfriend and never miss a lick or punch.” Then Shit-Stirrer goes to Guy B and says “Guy A says he’s gonna kick your ass.” Then Shit-Stirrer sits back and watches the fight with some of his buddies and collects his bets on the winner.

About half of my books have been deranked, with no apparent rhyme or reason, since they’re all pretty much tagged the same. Almost everything by one of my publishers, Ellora’s Cave, has been deranked. My het romance has been deranked, but my very explicit, tagged Gay and Erotica, book from Amazon’s CreateSpace has NOT.

If you search under Books, everything’s there. This only seems to affect the Big Front Page searach box, and the All Products search. Of course, Amazon’s search is wonky at best, but I KNEW that already.

I lean to the idea that February was a trial balloon to make sure the tactic worked and this was the true attack.

sb, maybe—-but I doubt a “little Johnny” was involved.  Children don’t usually have credit cards to buy books, and wingnuts don’t need children to hide behind to hate feminists and gay people.

This is just another “reason” for faux outrage that no one really cares about.

Not being a serious businessperson or technologist, D.K., you’re probably not aware that Amazon should be very concerned about this issue. When a company that depends on providing authoritative and trusted stats (like an internal sales ranking) to promote its own sales finds that those stats can be gamed, it’s a major problem—whatever the topic in question.

Amazon isn’t handling this crisis the way I would, but the fact that they’re flailing about has less to do with some secret sympathy for your nutty homophobia, and more with the facts that: A) it’s the end of a holiday weekend; B) they’re a large corporation, with all the inefficiencies that implies; and C) their codebase, which is relatively old in Internet years and is running on a complex infrastructure, can’t just be changed in 24-hours.

I’ve found a few of the delisted books are now listed again, and others are still delisted.

I am moderately surprised that there’s not already some sort of statement or explanation on Amazon’s front page. In a case like this, the embarrassment caused by admitting that your site had a problem is vastly outweighed by the need to get unhappy customers back on your good side. Having this happen, whether it’s a glitch, a hack, or on purpose, is a disaster—taking too long to respond just makes it worse.

This is just another “reason” for faux outrage that no one really cares about.

And speaking of trolls…

I’ll tell you who cares about this—Amazon does. Any online business does. An online bookseller that makes it harder for customers to find books and makes a significant portion of its customer base angry at them is an online bookseller that could be looking at reduced profits. Businesses are all about making money, not pissing off people who might otherwise be giving them money.

I doubt a “little Johnny” was involved.  Children don’t usually have credit cards to buy books, and wingnuts don’t need children to hide behind to hate feminists and gay people.

If anything, “little Johnny” is theoretical.  I hear more about “I saw such and such offensive thing and ZOMG What If My Kid* Had Been Standing Next To Me?!  WHAT IF?!!1!1!!11!” than I ever do about anybody’s kid actually seeing the thing they’re up in arms about.

*or even worse, what if A Kid, i.e. I don’t happen to personally have a kid or anything, but somebody out there might and they might not be policing what their kid can see on the internet.  Meta-hypothetical, if you will.

Gracchus - I would also guess that part of the reason nothing much seems to have been done is that Amazon is run out of Seattle, which is in Pacific time.  Granted I’m up unusually early on Monday mornings, but here it is 9:30 on the east coast and nothing has been fixed that couldn’t have been taken care of by low level techs and a PR intern (seriously, a press release to the AP that basically says, “nuh-uh!”???).  People are showing up to work, checking their email and making the rounds of their usual news sites, or driving in and hearing the latest news on the radio.  The story is getting bigger and bigger, and Amazon management is, what, sleeping off their Easter ham?

I hear more about “I saw such and such offensive thing and ZOMG What If My Kid* Had Been Standing Next To Me?!  WHAT IF?!!1!1!!11!” than I ever do about anybody’s kid actually seeing the thing they’re up in arms about.

Indeed. I am so fucking tired of that little gambit. As a parent I have never considered it remotely sane to want to delegate my job to the Thought Police.

I would also guess that part of the reason nothing much seems to have been done is that Amazon is run out of Seattle, which is in Pacific time.

Definitely. I’m not inclined to be so harsh on their response, though. The technological fix is probably a scaly problem, and the tricky PR fix of posting a statement that’s both honest and doesn’t make them look like total fools is not something that’s going to be left to the interns—especially since you want to put a positive spin on the upcoming fix. Add into the mix that Amazon is as infected by the HR Culture as any large company is, and it probably takes filling out a form in triplicate to change the brand of paperclips used, and the delay becomes understandable, if not entirely acceptable.

I advise clients to designate a trusted crisis team(s) (with stakeholders from tech ops, PR, finance, at least one C-level decisionsmaker, etc.) that’s available to convene 365-24-7 to address these major issues, as well as having people monitoring news items social media chatter about the org to catch the problems before they balloon out of control. Not sure if Amazon has something like that or not, but I’m willing to give them 24-hours from start of business Pacific time to address the issue.

If they wait any longer, and keep applying embarrassment-avoiding band-aids like restoring Brokeback Mountain and other individual titles, they’ll deserve the major PR clean-up mess.

This has Mars Hill’s fingerprints all over it.

I don’t have time to take a sewer bath in their online presence, but they are one tech-savvy bunch of wingnut gay and woman haterz and I don’t think for a minute that they don’t somehow have somebody or lots of somebodies working at Amazon who could have pulled this internally, or enough haters in their congregation to exploit the system.

Oh, and opponax?  Sounds like you’ve never spent much time in the Northwest.  People out there don’t drive like assholes for the same reason they don’t act like new yorkers in their work places either - nobody is in any particular hurry to make an appearance of fixing things for the sake of anybody else’s hurry. 

Although it is the spring after the equinox so the “only eight hours of daylight” problem isn’t the reason they aren’t up yet.

sorry - Opoponax

nobody is in any particular hurry to make an appearance of fixing things for the sake of anybody else’s hurry. 

People on the west coast don’t bother to take into account the fact that the entire rest of the country is up and doing business before they are?  Especially in damage control situations like this?

This might be the New Yorker in me, but damn that’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard.  Man, no wonder y’all aren’t the center of the universe like we are…

Ms Kate

By Mars Hill, do you mean this? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Hill_Church )

Or what do you mean, Mars Hill, this? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Hill_College )

Mars Hill church - that backward institution with the meglomaniacal minister who said that Ted Haggard’s problems were all his wife’s fault.

The mysogyny and the homophobia are entirely in line with their theology.

Oh, and Opoponax, keep yer hurry in NYC, ‘kay?  Wouldn’t want you getting a jaywalking ticket.

Hmm. Interesting. Thanks Ms Kate.

Lots of theories, which is a good thing I think. Not much evidence, yet.

Ms Kate-

Thanks for scaring me. It’s bad enough to have the wingnuts on my side of the state, but seeing that in the heart of Ballard and spreading like wildfire is rather terrifying.

Of course, I did like wikipedia’s comment in the article about the Pacific Northwest being the “least churched” area in the country. Obviously the writer of the article hasn’t been on the dry side wedged between the Mormons, Catholics, and various weird offshoots of Seventh-Day Adventism…

This was covered on an LAT blog and on http://www.sfgate.com  An A.mazon.com spokesperson characterized it as a ‘glitch’ that they were working on as of <a ref=“http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/04/12/entertainment/e195040D58.DTL&tsp=1”>SUNDAY</a>:

“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.

So much for your theorizing, TO.

Perhaps they are waiting for the problem to be solved and understood before they say anything substantial about it.

And perhaps they should have an opt-in safe search rather than a facility for user-generated disappearing of books that just begs for such “glitches”.

Perhaps they are waiting for the problem to be solved and understood before they say anything substantial about it.

That sort of thing totally used to work back in the 18th century when a guy had to ride a horse cross-country in order for word to get around.

Is TO me?  What theorizing, btw?

Just did another check.

Not only is Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit still not reinstated, but result #4 in the search under that title is a girl-on-girl porno DVD called “The Gymnast”.  Lulz…

“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.

So much for your theorizing, TO.

Perhaps they are waiting for the problem to be solved and understood before they say anything substantial about it.

A “glitch”? How does a ‘glitch’ end up selectively de-listing hundreds of GLBT titles? Sorry, I’m not really convinced by that explanation.

From reading the comments on that SFGate article, neither are most people.

I sent a letter; they sent back a form letter with the “glitch” quote in it. I responded saying “This isn’t a ‘glitch’. Someone, inside or outside the company, has been gaming the system since at least February. Please be more transparent about what’s going on.”

It’s entirely possible that Amazon doesn’t know what’s going on quite yet.  It’s extremely important to remember this happened over a holiday weekend.  Pulling people in for emergency work on a holiday is probably impossible, since a lot of people will leave town to visit family for Easter.  The real world can’t respond as fast as a mob can Twitter, and I say this as a happy member of that mob.

If they were hacked, or even done wrong by an outside party who went on a bad-tagging spree, they’d be smartest to out the real culprits so that all the anger for this has a target.

Maybe why nobody at Amazon is saying anything.

They understand their own ranking systems (I hope)—that’s enough to provide upset end-users and suppliers with a broad understanding of how items mistakenly got de-ranked (and no, blaming an unspecified “glitch in our systems” isn’t enough—this “glitch” looks to me like something originally intended to be a feature before it was abused).

At the very least, given the outrage and rumours floating around, the Director of PR should have issued a stronger statement detailing their org’s core values (open marketplace of ideas and all that) and how this “glitch” was completely unacceptable in that context. Most people are remarkably understanding about an error or delay or glitch if they’re given substantive info (this is basically what happened; it’s unacceptable in light of our business mission; this is approx. how long it’ll take to fix; this is what we’ll do in the interim to make good; apologies, etc.).

Assuming (as most informed techies seem to be doing) that this was an exploit, finding out who’s to blame is a lot more time-consuming, of course (in this case, probably matching IPs to certain tags on a given day or days, then finding most-actives). The IPs still won’t give a lot of info or cause for legal action, but I’m willing to bet that they belong to the sort of Xtian fantasist bedwetter who wastes a beautiful Easter weekend in an ultimately fruitless attempt to censor 100s of “naughty” books.

A “glitch”? How does a ‘glitch’ end up selectively de-listing hundreds of GLBT titles?

I saw one blog post tallying up tags that the deranked books have in common.  If something got attached to those tags that automatically deranked the books, that would be a legitimate glitch that fucked all these authors over.  Most books have at least half a dozen tags on them, and I get the impression that these tags can be influenced by third parties, such as sellers and possibly users.  It is possible that a glitch in the system allowed someone else to game the system.

If something got attached to those tags that automatically deranked the books, that would be a legitimate glitch that fucked all these authors over.

Understanding how databases work, how they are linked, and how these sorts of systems fit together on at least a schematic scale, this makes me all the more suspicious that they have a mole working for them. 

Which may explain the delay in response even as they undo the damage - HR stuff and all of that keeps them from just coming out and saying “some Mars Hill rat punked us from the inside”.  It isn’t even clear that they can say anything if it isn’t outside the person’s job description to take some liberties with banning.

Why am I suspicious that a member of a gigantic megachurch in the Seattle area with a theology of woman-hating and gay hating is involved from the inside?  Do the math.

Most books have at least half a dozen tags on them, and I get the impression that these tags can be influenced by third parties, such as sellers and possibly users.

I’m not entirely sure about this, but from my various searches for de-listed titles, I’ve come across separate listings for the books in question from outside sellers.  Which leads me to believe that Amazon uses two separate systems - one for Amazon’s own stock, and one for their affiliates.  The #amazonfail non-glitch seems to be primarily affecting the system that deals with Amazon’s in-network sales.

Wow, I just went to the subject Nonfiction > Womens Studies on Amazon and this is what I got:

http://www.amazon.com/Womens-Studies-Nonfiction-Books/b/qid=1239638550/ref=sr_tc_img_2_0?ie=UTF8&node=11325

sjk: This group contacted Amazon who not wanted to deal with the crazies

Which is why, even if it is a conspiracy, it’s necessary to raise a shitstorm. As in, “You think dealing with a band of screaming wingnuts is bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Yes, TO is you, and in answer to your question:

I would also guess that part of the reason nothing much seems to have been done is that Amazon is run out of Seattle, which is in Pacific time.

It’s entirely possible that Amazon doesn’t know what’s going on quite yet.  It’s extremely important to remember this happened over a holiday weekend.  Pulling people in for emergency work on a holiday is probably impossible, since a lot of people will leave town to visit family for Easter.

Amazon is a $19bn per annum company, with 20k employees (not all of them Christian or Jewish). That does mean that it’s a BigCorp that moves like a pack of sloths in the midday sun, but it also means that they can afford several crisis teams, at least one dedicated employee to monitor the net for chatter, and a PR Director who can do more than obvious CYA.

I’m not expecting them to fix this “glitch” overnight, and I’m not expecting a detailed breakdown of the nature of the glitch. What I do expect from a company like Amazon is that they’re savvy enough to treat their customers and suppliers (and industry observers and analysts) with more respect and transparency.

Understanding how databases work, how they are linked, and how these sorts of systems fit together on at least a schematic scale, this makes me all the more suspicious that they have a mole working for them.

I doubt if we’ll ever discover this part of the story. As noted above, my guess is that excluding items tagged by users as “adult” (and probably others) was intended (or, if you like, sold by the mole to the product managers) as a “family-friendly, folksonomic” feature. Then, sometime in February, a bad actor (Xtian fantasist, 4chan-ner, whatever) figured out how to abuse it, and bided his time until the long weekend to conduct a spectacular stunt.

Ashley, that’s really pretty amazing. This issue may have had to do with some kind of internal glitch, but it just seems too targeted to be a random fuckup. It looks more like an exploit to me.

Angelia Sparrow: As I understand it, Bantown is the internet version of “Let’s You and Him Fight,”

For a Fistful of Dollars.

Graccus: ...their [amazon’s] codebase, which is relatively old in Internet years and is running on a complex infrastructure, can’t just be changed in 24-hours.

I feel with their tech folks. The very thought of management coming down with OMG PR disaster fix this before Tuesday and a database the size of Jupiter with years of coding wrapped around it and no one remembering exactly how or why it works gives me flashbacks. And PR’s idea of damage control is blaming it on tech, of course.

Strange, I’m still seeing books about evolution, global warming, and other wingnut-unfriendly topics…

But remember, sex is dirty, dirty, dirty, and disgusting, the dirtiest and most disgusting thing human beings do, unless it is done by a heterosexual couple within the sanctified bonds of marriage, to produce God’s most precious gift, a baby.

I’m actually getting more irritated by this as the day goes on. I’ve checked back a few times during the morning—it’s now about 9:30 Pacific, and there’s no explanation on the Amazon page. Even worse, their recommendation system is now recommending several anti-feminist and anti-gay books to me because I’d been testing their system with various delisted books earlier.

Listen, if you’re the PR manager for a company the size of Amazon, and something like this blows up, you don’t come strolling into the office Monday morning at 9:30 or 10 to start meandering your way through a response. You’re in the office on Easter Sunday—or way early on Monday morning, if the news got to you late—with an IT guy in tow to make sure some sort of response is ready and uploaded onto the front page. And a web-savvy company should know better than to let Twitter and the blogs spend a couple of days talking about a disaster like this. It reinforces every bad thing being said about the company.

I swear, some days, I just wanna send companies like this my resume and say, “Hey, I’ve never worked at a company as large as yours, but if you’d had me on board, this catastrophe would’ve been vastly less catastrophic, ‘cause I’da already been working on this before it had a chance to hit the mass media.” (grumbles and sends another bunch of resumes to rathole Texas newspapers that wouldn’t hire someone my age anyway)

I would also guess that part of the reason nothing much seems to have been done is that Amazon is run out of Seattle, which is in Pacific time.

I fail to see what your post has to do with that, as all that has happened so far is:

1. someone (probably a low-level flunky) crafted an email under the name of one of the PR execs and sent it to a few media outlets.  An email that does not reflect the reality of the situation at all, and which doesn’t even bother to apologize meaningfully or do any kind of damage control with their customer base.  You don’t have to know which gang of trolls struck, or exactly how you were hacked, to say, “hey, we’re super sorry about what happened, everything will be reinstated as quickly as possible, and to make it up we’re discounting all affected titles by 30% for the next two weeks.” 

2. some of the more notorious titles had begun to be individually reinstated as of 8-9 am (eastern) this morning.

Again, that’s nothing.  Virtually no PR response at all (no one spoken to in person, no apology, nothing on the site itself), and a couple minor fixes on the site.  Nothing beyond basic CYA.  And here it is going on 1pm eastern time and that’s still all they’ve come up with so far.

Ashley, that’s really pretty amazing. This issue may have had to do with some kind of internal glitch, but it just seems too targeted to be a random fuckup. It looks more like an exploit to me.

That it’s targeted doesn’t exclude glitch.  The glitch is they didn’t write the system to prevent hacks from abusing it.  But I suspect that someone not internal to the company did this, though “disgruntled employee” is always a possibility.  Amazon simply doesn’t have a history of wingnuttery to make “active assault on feminist and GLBT titles” the first possibility. 

If we want to be effective as online activists, it’s probably best that we take these sorts of things into consideration.  The more accurate our assessment of the cause of this, the better we’ll be at fighting back.

At the very least, given the outrage and rumours floating around, the Director of PR should have issued a stronger statement detailing their org’s core values (open marketplace of ideas and all that) and how this “glitch” was completely unacceptable in that context. Most people are remarkably understanding about an error or delay or glitch if they’re given substantive info (this is basically what happened; it’s unacceptable in light of our business mission; this is approx. how long it’ll take to fix; this is what we’ll do in the interim to make good; apologies, etc.).

If they’re smart, they’ll get right on that.  But I really hate it when online crowds get angry over something and demand an immediate response from their target, and refuse to take into consideration that the target could be confused about what’s going on, or in the case of when they’ve targeted individuals, unable to grasp that not everyone is online all the time.  I cannot tell you how many times someone’s been in a complete snit because I’ve not responded right away to something they’ve said, and I got home and saw this and was like, “Dude/dudette, can’t someone go to the store/have a quickie/watch TV/spend time on paid work?”  Which is a different issue, of course, but I imagine Amazon has similar problems.  They probably want to narrow down what caused this before issuing a statement, and that could very well take time, especially if they were hacked.

Virtually no PR response at all (no one spoken to in person, no apology, nothing on the site itself), and a couple minor fixes on the site.  Nothing beyond basic CYA.  And here it is going on 1pm eastern time and that’s still all they’ve come up with so far.

Exactly. This is PR of the “Maybe if we don’t say anything, they’ll forget we’re here” school, which only makes people angrier.

“Dear Amazon customers, as you may have heard, a recent computer glitch lead to the accidental delisting and reclassification of a large number of books with GLBT and feminist themes. This was in no way intended, and we apologize to everyone for the error. We are working to correct the problem in our database, but this may take some time—please be patient with us.”

Throw that at the top of the front page template, and Amazon’s problems would immediately start slowing down.

Again, this stuff is goddamn simple, and it’s frustrating that so many supposedly-savvy PR pros don’t understand it.

My Amazon recommendation page is missing quite a few of the tags that I specifically added. Such as Gay. Something is seriously fucked over there.

cannot tell you how many times someone’s been in a complete snit because I’ve not responded right away to something they’ve said, and I got home and saw this and was like, “Dude/dudette, can’t someone go to the store/have a quickie/watch TV/spend time on paid work?”

Last I checked, Amazon was a major corporation, not one person who is running the place for free out of the goodness of their heart because they think an online bookstore is a fun and worthwhile activity to do in their spare time.

Amanda:

That’s precisely what I meant with the “torches and pitchforks” comment upthread.

Scott:

It doesn’t surprise me. I’m a regular reader on scienceblogs.com, where Matt Nisbet’s hyperaccomodationist stance towards the anti-science crowd and his general tone-deafness when it comes to his alleged area of expertise of framing has made enemies of virtually everyone else on the site. Or alternately “Dr.” Phil McGraw, who is a PR guy by training and whose concept of psychology is based almost entirely on methods of persuasion.

LauraB, that’s a statement given to a website called “publishersmarketplace.com”, which seems to be aimed at writers and the publishing industry.  When you look at it that way, it’s almost a slap in the face.  Sure, they’ll issue a statement to the publishers, just to clarify that this wasn’t a planned change in policy.  But the little guys?  The people who actually keep them afloat with purchases?  Screw ‘em.  The mob will forget about this clusterfuck inside of a week, and by the time Pride Month rolls around in June the LGBT sections will be booming again.

Since Dumbledore was gay…when are they going to de-rank the Harry Potter series?

But I really hate it when online crowds get angry over something and demand an immediate response from their target

Absolutely. I’m not defending the speculation or rumours or impatience, just acknowledging their existence—and suggesting that, in the case of a major failure like this, a company like Amazon might want to have someone on their PR staff who understands that, too.

They probably want to narrow down what caused this before issuing a statement, and that could very well take time, especially if they were hacked.

As many of our customers and suppliers discovered over the holiday weekend, our sales rank system has been incorrectly excluding certain products on a mass basis. We are working to discover the cause or causes of this problem, which seem to be related to our user tagging system [or whatever—just provide something]. Amazon’s core mission from its founding has been to provide consumers with an open marketplace of diverse ideas, and any aspect of our technology that interferes with that mission is unacceptable.

At the moment we are working hard to narrow down the sources of this problem and fix them while preserving access to Amazon’s core features. Our engineers currently estimate X hours to a fix, and we’ll be providing updates in this space as the situation changes. We apologise for any inconvenience or distress this might have caused Amazon’s customers, publishers, and authors, and look forward to using this unfortunate situation as an opportunity to improve a service whose user base shares our passion for free access to a broad universe of ideas.

It took me less than 10 minutes in the middle of my work day to bang that out, and while the well-compensated PR Director of a multi-billion dollar company (or her lackeys) could do a heckuva lot better, I guarantee you that such a statement being posted Sunday night on the front page (or under a prominent link) would calm down 90% of the pitchfork-and-torches mob and stanch the most extreme rumours about Amazon’s “complicity”—all without exposing the company to any more liability it would have had from the “glitch” itself.

It boggles my mind that a company like Amazon wouldn’t be all over this situation within 12 hours of discovering it, but then again it reminds me why I avoid working for BigCorps like Amazon in the first place.

Nipplegate, for instance, was something that happened on LiveJournal where a user’s photo which featured a picture of a breastfeeding child was removed supposedly for being obscene (a case where, I believe, the sort of flagging procedure discussed in this thread was at the heart of the removal - it seemed like people were complaining about a user image that legitimately violated the terms of service).

Kinda. The TOS got changed shortly after the pic of a baby breastfeeding was removed.

The TOS used to say something like “no graphically sexual or graphically violent images in default user icons” but after LJ Abuse got a flood of reports from a troll who was annoyed at having his default icon reported, they changed the TOS so that it read “no nudity” instead of “nothing graphically sexual”, and clarified that by “nudity” they included female, but not male, nipples.

It was an excellent example of Bantown working on a small scale - and it worked partly because LJ Abuse and Six Apart saw no difficulty with the position that babies breastfeeding are obscene. 

Similiarly, while I think it possible that someone has hacked the system at Amazon, if so, what let them hack the system was that Amazon sees nothing wrong with removing “adult” books from the sales ranks - and that some people at Amazon evidently find it perfectly reasonable that any book tagged “Lesbian” “Gay” or “Transgender” is an “adult” book.

some people at Amazon evidently find it perfectly reasonable that any book tagged “Lesbian” “Gay” or “Transgender” is an “adult” book.

That sounds somewhat more plausible than Amazon being stupid enough to exclude from sales rank based directly on user-generated tags. I can see an Amazon employee who’s hateful or narrow-minded enough to automatically associate those folksonomic terms with an Amazon-authoritative “adult” filter keyword to also make the same association with terms like “feminist” or “sex education.” If that’s the case, it shouldn’t be difficult to rectify the error and fire the person responsible for extremely poor judgement (or, if Ms Kate is correct, malicious intent).

Romance novels haven’t had their ratings removed, and I can tell you that a lot of them are “adult”—they’re on a level with Letters to Penthouse.

From their point of view, better to give one statement to an industry pub than to have every single publisher in the country calling their liaison at amazon.com corporate HQ.

Sure.  And while one part of the PR team is on that, another part of the PR team is drafting a statement not unlike the example Gracchus gave above and having that placed prominently on the site (as well as issuing it in press release form to the usual media suspects). 

Y’all want to hear something cute?  The New York Times just put up a story about how companies are using Twitter to provide better customer service and get useful feedback.

I think publisher’s marketplace called them for a statement, hence the response (at least that’s what I inferred from the article). From the point of view of a “reactive” CYA PR drone still mired in the late 20th century MSM access-journalism paradigm, better to give one statement to an industry pub behind a paywall than to have every single publisher in the country calling their liaison at amazon.com corporate HQ.

Fixed that for clarity. Between mass e-mails to publishers/partners, Amazon’s publisher/supplier extranet, and the front page of the main site, there are better ways to get the (scanty, vague) word out and avoid those phone calls to the head office.

Sorry, but this is more fail on Amazon’s part.

Unrelatedly, if they were hacked, I want their first priority to be making sure that their credit card and payment systems are secure.  I don’t know if that’s an issue or not—I haven’t read anything to indicate that it is—but given the situation it’s a concern.

It is a concern, and at the minimum a huge e-commerce company should include a statement that the payments system is unrelated to the problem or “glitchy” components (which I believe would be the truth).

LauraB, for more about the plausibility of Weev’s boast, see Holly’s comments at the relevant Feministe thread.  I’d link directly, but I don’t know the politics of that and don’t want to open up any tins of annelids.

The general consensus I’m getting around the web is that Weev is not trustworthy and it’s implausible on various levels.

<blockquote>Uh, maybe someone can decode all that code for us?

The guy’s claiming that he used a combination of a “cross-site forgery attack” (basically a brief and invisible hijacking of your browser) and phony Amazon accounts (set up by third-world crowdsourcers often employed by spammers and MMORPG gold harvesters) to register thousands of “unique” adult-material complaints/reports against a list of harvested Amazon items (generated by his code) having “homosexuality” or other user-generated tags.

I guess it could work, though I’d be curious as to which “Alexa top 1000” sites (mostly high-profile businesses and orgs) would deliberately tolerate cross-site attack scripts and invisible frames on their sites. It also doesn’t take credit for the attacks on feminist-style keywords, although other arrested-development cases may have followed his lead with their own harvested lists (doesn’t take too many brains to swap out a keyword ).

A lot of 4chan/griefer types are going to be claiming responsibility, with the same Beavis and Butthead pseudo rationales. Any one might be legit or might be after-the-fact “how I’d do it” reverse engineering. I’ll let someone more familiar with Amazon’s systems comment if this particular approach could work.

I just searched for some of the deranked titles (which all came up as they should), then checked the “Customers with Similar Searches Purchased…” suggestions, and got books by Jeanette Winterson and “Emma and Meesha My Boy: A Two Moms Story” and “Who’s in a Family?” (11:55 AM Pacific time).  However, the “Items Customers Tagged ‘Homosexuality’...” suggestions were all anti-gay titles. Still no “we’re fixing the problem” blurb, though.  FWIW.

As well as from the point of view of the guy who’s trying to figure out how to solve a problem on a Sunday evening of a holiday weekend, where people have been out of the office on Friday and many may be on Monday, and who wants to have all available hands on deck for fixing the problem rather than answering irate phone calls.

This was basically the situation at my office, with the added bonus of a holiday vibe on Thursday due to a lot of people taking personal days or leaving early for Passover.  And yet if I’d had an email, text, or phone call over the weekend from a coworker about an impending disaster (especially an impeding disaster on that sort of scale), bare minimum I’d have been in at 5 or 6 this morning to get in front of it.  Bitching and moaning and asking for my cab fare to be reimbursed, but in and dealing with it nonetheless.  And I’m a nobody.  higher ups would have been in all weekend fixing it.  Blowing off the Easter egg hunt, even, if it was epic fail on this level.

I think I’ve actually figured out why there’s no PR statement on their website yet—their lawyers told ‘em not to say anything or they’d get sued.

Which, ya know, won’t actually stop them from getting sued, if anyone’s going to sue them. And prompt response would likely reduce the level of anger that would prompt authors to sue them for delisting their books. So the point still stands—prompt and competent PR would have kept this from boiling over at the level it has now.

But everyone tends to believe whatever the lawyers tell ‘em.  :/

A lot of people in my office went out of town, too.  Guess what.  Bad shit happens.  Even on holiday weekends.  It sucks, but when you have a certain level of responsibility you have to put on your big girl panties and deal with it.  Just kinda sorta leaving it till Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday, or like, y’know, whenever it is that Ted’s coming back from his vacation time doesn’t cut it.

As well as from the point of view of the guy who’s trying to figure out how to solve a problem on a Sunday evening of a holiday weekend, where people have been out of the office on Friday and many may be on Monday, and who wants to have all available hands on deck for fixing the problem rather than answering irate phone calls.

Your company doesn’t have to take the irate phone calls if you’re pro-active and understand the Internet (not to mention voicemail announcements)—two qualities I’d expect in a senior PR manager for a multi-billion dollar e-commerce company.

They may have also sent out an email to all their contacts at publishers, as well—not in the office today, can’t ask my pals in the sales department.

Even more reason to post on the main Web site, too. If I’m curious about a site’s status, that’s the first place I go. Then I would check on the public (i.e. non pay-walled) general news sites or the corp’s twitter channel or status Web site.

At least, you know, the employees who have to deal with the outside world, which excludes both many higher-ups and programmers.

PR is the voice of the “higher-ups,” not the employees. If I was Bezos or a shareholder I’d be bloody furious right now.

Bottom line, I’m not willing to condemn them just yet, given that their workday is only 3 hours old.

The head office’s workday is 3 hours old, but the incident came to public attention on Sunday, three time zones away. Part of the problem is that a major international 24-7 e-commerce operation’s senior PR people are actually thinking in terms of “our workday is only 3 hours old.”

I’m a major proponent of work-life balance, but a company like Amazon has no excuse for not putting contingency plans in place for an attack or other crisis. In fact, having those plans (and trusted people) in place ensures that not everyone in the org has to be on-call 24-7 in case of emergency, and that the majority of staff can enjoy their holiday weekends in peace.

but of course it’s all out the window if you’ve traveled to [insert far-away hometown here] for Easter.

If you’re on deck for the fire-control team, you either stay in town or, if you can’t, switch off with your counterpart on the alternate team.

Also, most of this stuff can be dealt with over the Internet or a mobile phone teleconference, anyhow.

I think I’ve actually figured out why there’s no PR statement on their website yet—their lawyers told ‘em not to say anything or they’d get sued.

No doubt that risk-averse lawyers played a part here (and should be represented on those fire-control teams). But it is possible to draft a statement that implies no corporate liability beyond that which is already apparent from the incident, or will be discovered in a lawsuit.

I think the number of people who will actually close their accounts and leave the site is vanishingly small.

Really?  I know I’m just one person, but I personally see no reason to continue to go to amazon for any of the things I currently do if they don’t make it right in a timely manner.  There was a time when amazon was the only way to get media you couldn’t find locally.  That’s not true anymore.  There are easily dozens of alternatives for books and media online, many of which are cheaper, better, or more convenient.  They’ve recently branched into mp3 downloads—why go there when I can go to iTunes?  They’re pushing this kindle thing hard—why bother to even start the pangs of gadget lust now?

Right, but PR has to hear from the tech guys—in terms that they can understand—what’s going on

Again, Amazon is a 24-7 Web-based operation, so there will be sysadmins and coders on duty, and at least one senior IT person on-call (fire-control team or not)—tech is about the only dept that doesn’t get a break. It really shouldn’t take tech that long to determine why a mass amount of specific titles are suddenly being excluded from their own ranking algorithm, and the senior IT person should be able to translate that into a 1-sentence explanation for PR.

To re-cap: apparently no-one in marketing or PR (or an outsource vendor) was monitoring chatter about the brand over the weekend; apparently there was no organised fire-control team on deck in case things went pear-shaped;  and apparently no-one in PR is operating with an understanding that there are ways to get the word out beyond established relationships with trade media outlets.

If all of those things were in place, when I checked my newsfeed at 8AM this morning I would have seen a statement similar to the one I dummied up, perhaps with even more detail. As it is, all I see (and continue to see) is rampant speculation and rumour-mongering.

If I were amazon, I’d be more worried about furious publishers than furious customers.

In the long term, yes. In the short term, they’ve taken an unnecessary hit to their brand goodwill with customers, and squandered an opportunity to make lemonade from lemons by re-stating in adamant terms their org’s core values.

4chan is an Alexa top 1000 site, so…

Good point. Everyone gets punked, and even the foolers get fooled.

Honestly, I can also see a lot of sysadmins who run shady but popular porn sites and trackers putting X-site scripts up to join in the lulz, but I don’t think the owners would be too pleased.

But the % of their customers who are looking for feminist, glbt-interest, and/or disability-interest books is pretty small.

The % of their customers who expect Amazon top-seller lists unfiltered by bigots and/or pranksters is larger than the customers looking for Twilight books and feminist, GLBT, and disability-interest books combined.

For Amazon, the issue isn’t ultimately one of disappointing homosexual or feminist customers, but one of all customers’ trust in their brand and the systems underlying it.

LauraB, apples and oranges.

Pointing out that there are no feminist books on Amazon’s top 25 sellers list is a factoid that means nothing. The issue isn’t that people won’t buy the feminist version of Twilight because they can’t find it. The issue is that there are people who aren’t willing to buy anything from Amazon anymore over this.

You think that feminist readers don’t count for a huge portion of Amazon sales? Hard to say. I myself buy almost all my groceries and canned food from Amazon, because it’s one of the easier ways to get organic and green products to my door, especially with my disability. I also purchase approximately 6-9 books per month from Amazon. I might be an exception. Or maybe Opo and Scott and Gracchus can say the exact same thing. I don’t know. But don’t assume that feminists don’t make up for a lot of sales just because everyone on earth logged onto Amazon one time to buy Twilight.

Just a thought.

In the short term, they’ve taken an unnecessary hit to their brand goodwill with customers, and squandered an opportunity to make lemonade from lemons by re-stating in adamant terms their org’s core values.

QFT.

LauraB, this is sort of what I was trying to say above.  Do I think an organized boycott is going to work?  Probably not, just due to the short attention spans involved.  But this damages the brand.  And it gets worse and worse the longer they go without taking some sort of action on this.

Re Essie -

I don’t purchase a huge bulk of my books from Amazon, but I will usually end up there if I’m looking for something specific I can’t find in the bricks and mortar stores which are convenient to me.  I’ve also looked into a kindle because I have a bad habit of buying cheap paperbacks I’ll only read once, and if nothing else kindle would cut down on the storage issues.  I also do a lot of mp3 purchasing on Amazon because it’s DRM-free and they often have really good deals on things (which their interface actually makes it easy to find, unlike iTunes).

Right, but the other issue is that amazon, like every other major bookseller in the country makes most of its money of of a small handful of titles

Best-sellers, in other words. And the herd-mentality customers who form the bulk of those purchases identify these hit titles by checking best-seller lists—the NYT in old media, closely followed (perhaps even preceded) by Amazon in new media.

Now what would happen if one of those lists was known to be compromised by the exclusion of certain titles for no good reason, and that the brand that owned the list seemed to be doing nothing about it? Rumours and speculation start. Special interests get annoyed. Twitter campaigns start. The MSM notices and reports. Confidence in those lists takes a hit. And all this happens fast.

Why is this a problem? People start looking at competing on-line retailer lists like B&N;or Powell’s, and will probably stay on those sites to buy their books rather than do a new search on Amazon (because convenience and trust trumps brand loyalty if the brand takes a hit). The equals lost revenue and increased inventory costs for Amazon.

Remember, we’re not looking at this from the publisher’s POV (that’s a whole other trust problem, as you described), but from the consumer’s.

Most books don’t make a lot of money, many even lose money.  This is the way book publishing works.  You get lucky with a “hit”—Twilight or The Time Traveler’s Wife or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1st UK printing: 500 copies) and those books subsidize the rest of your business.  It’s pretty much the world’s worst business model, actually, at least from the point of view of a shareholder.

While that very well may be, the bottom line is that you can pick up a copy of Twilight in any bookstore in the country. 

You can pick up a copy of The Well of Loneliness in a very small minority of bookstores.

You pretty much can’t just run out and buy a copy of PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions about Gender and Sexuality anywhere at all unless you happen to live in a major US city or on/near a college campus with a strong liberal reputation.  I live in New York, and I can’t be sure that if I wanted that specific book I would be able to find it in a bricks and mortar store here.

So, yes, it’s important for Amazon to be able to assure customers that they’re not transitioning into a sort of media Walmart which is willing to play morality police because, hey, we don’t make money off that pervert garbage anyway, what we really need to be doing is focusing on moving more copies of Twilight!  Otherwise customers who want anything more than Twilight or Harry Potter will go elsewhere.

Opop,

From my research, the Kindle will not save money for cheap paperbacks, which is disappointing because - well, shiny - but also because that’s supposed to be the whole draw of the Kindle. Why Amazon is not pricing the Kindle books competitively is beyond me.

However, if you like cheap paperbacks, nearly every paperback under $9 on Amazon is part of the 4-for-3 promotion that they maintain constantly. That and the free shipping on orders over $25 makes my Amazon purchases much cheaper than anything at the brick-and-mortar store. Very nice. FYI.

Laura,

Just gonna have to agree to disagree on this, I suppose.

It looks like, for most kindle books, you save $4-5 on the typical paperback price.  And then it seems like there are some books which are significantly cheaper, which is nice.  It would take a long time to nullify the $350 cost of the gadget itself, but then you’re also saving storage space and avoiding the awful truth of the fact that you buy a paperback in an airport, read it in a day, and then it’s every bit as much garbage as yesterday’s paper.

One thing that doesn’t seem to be set up very well is the fact that, with kindle, there’s really no such thing as a particular “edition” of a book.  If I’m buying a physical book, and it’s a classic that I’m going to want to keep, I might splash out for the more expensive Modern Library or Penguin Classics edition just because it’s nicer rather than the $5 trade paperback copy.  But Les Miserables for $15?  WHY?  It’s in the frakkin’ public domain!  I can download it for free from project gutenberg!  I could buy a decently bound used copy for $2.

What I really want, though, is a kindle/ipod hybrid which also has games (just simple casual jezzball style games would be fine), and which can access non-amazon formats (for instance some kind of tie-in with project gutenberg would actually be pretty amazing).

In support of The Opoponax’s point about the Long Tail, this link notes the following:

The American academic Erik Brynjolfsson researched the Long Tail phenomenon using the example of the book market. A typical bookshop constantly stocks between 50,000 and around 100,000 titles, for which there is an appropriate demand in the marketplace. However, these books are also available from Amazon, but their range includes a further 2.9 million titles. Brynjolfsson and his team analyzed sales and came to the conclusion that Amazon achieves up to 40 percent of its revenue from those books that cannot normally be found in a traditional bookshop.

That’s not to say that Amazon will lose 40% of its revenue because of this incident, but it may ultimately lose 5% of that amount. 2% of $19bn translates to $380mm—that’s a lot of PR flacks and in-house lawyers and ITsec staff.

Add in the general hit to the best-seller list value proposition I described above, and you’re talking real money. There’s a reason that Bubble-Yum Gum or McDonalds reacted to ridiculous schoolyard rumours about the contents of their key products, and why P&G;‘s PR people still send out letters disclaiming its founders’ allegiance to the Prince of Darkness, decades after that silly rumour was first spread.

Consumer confidence is going to have to take a much bigger hit than what we’ve seen here in order for this to happen.

It’s consumer confidence in a key value proposition for the market segment you describe (best-seller herd-followers). These top-seller lists in various category drive a lot of sales, both general and niche. When it’s discovered that items that should be in the lists aren’t, and that they can be gamed by Beavis and Butthead, that’s a real confidence problem.

The methodology behind the list is a trade secret.  Note that people are not screaming about that.

They’re not screaming about that because they find what they expect to find, and because the NYT has invested decades of time and millions of dollars building trust across generations in that key value proposition of the newspaper’s brand. Amazon hasn’t been around long enough for that.

People still buy a ton of shit from Wal-Mart, because it’s cheap and convenient.

And because they often don’t have a lot of other alternatives for commodity goods. Books are a different market, and “cheap and convenient” in the case of the market segment in question is dependent on trusted top-seller lists.

Amazon’s volume of sales is huge.  Yes, it’s idiotic that they’re making it harder for people to buy books, and if they have any brains at all they’ll make a safesearch-esque opt-in program.

They could do even better with that kind of functionality if they’re really clever (and I’m sure they are). But that’s another issue.

Weird, I spent a lot of time typing up a last response, and it somehow got eaten.  Hmph.  Anyway, I’m pretty much done here.  I don’t think any of us are going to change LauraB’s mind about the fact that if we want a book shopping experience where we get 10-20 titles shoved down our throats and can’t be sure of finding anything we’re really interested in, we’ll start doing most of our book shopping at Target.  Some people want more than just Twilight and Oprah’s book club, which is WHY Amazon has been so popular over the last decade.  If Amazon wants to change their business model, there’s very little keeping any of us from taking our business somewhere that actually meets our needs.

JoAnne, A great many romance novels were de-ranked. Not just small and medium press, like Phaze and Ellora’s Cave, but Harlequin’s Blaze line, Kensington’s Aphrodesia imprint, and others have been hit by this.

Ellora’s Cave had people on it yesterday afternoon, getting all the titles and ISBNs of what had been stripped and apparently kicked some serious butt today, since all of their titles have been re-ranked.

Hey, check this out, this is the response that I just got back from Amazon.com about 1½ hours ago:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

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. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search. 

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon. 

Sincerely,

Customer Service Department

Well, that’s a bit better, don’t y’all think? At least they sound apologetic, like they now realize the extent of the issue & the amount of legitimate anger it could cause.

What do others think of this response?

Many thanks to The Opoponax and Angelina Sparrow for explaining “Bantown!”

I still don’t see why anyone (such as, say, Amanda) gravitated toward that kind of theory—in which, if I understand (for I am not as smart as Groucho, even after having things explained to me) the bottom line is that the people who enable the attack and initiate the whole mess have little personal stake in the thing; they just do it for the hell of it. But they use others who are very glad to make this happen for their own strongly-held ax-grinding reasons.

Well, what difference would that make? The latter are still morally responsible for choosing to storm through the gate the former hold open. Why assume, then, that the crusaders are so unlikely to have someone among them with skills or access to make their own agenda happen—why assume that only Merry Pranksters of a sociopathic bent can do it? Was there something I am overlooking about the early evidence that somehow tended to rule out a bunch of fundie crusaders doing it all themselves, for Jesus?

Now we’ve got this “weev” dweeb’s story to consider—what he says he did was he did it himself, with the unwitting help of who knows how many thousands of innocent shoppers or just Net-wanderers and the paid help of internet minions. Which is not “Bantown” at all but some kind of mega-hack.

Not that I just assume we should believe “weev.”

In fact, paranoid type that I am, I’d rather believe the “Mars Hill” or whoever theory. And then I wouldn’t put it past them to put out some red herrings such as “weev” for plausible deniability.

Because whoever did this—and I think no matter what the detailed story turns out to be, surely someone or a lot of someones acted deliberately and maliciously—is a frakhead of the highest order and I’d cheerfully see them locked up to do some hard time.

As for Amazon—well, as I said far above, I have long thought that the common Net custom (at least here in Left Blogtopia where I hang out) of “citing” a book by its Amazon listing is questionable—that’s what libraries, or original publishers, are for. (Libraries cite the original publisher—we should do the same.)

Now if Amazon belatedly comes up with a reasonably handsome response to this mess, and we all understand that it just took the poor dinosaur a while to react, I’ll feel kind of sad that it looks like I’m just petty to choose this moment to change my citing ways. But that will be too bad.

I’m not much of a customer, and I rather like buying books in a real bookstore—a locally owned one if I can. (Dunno where to find such a good bookstore in Reno though). But I can at least stop giving free advertising that validates their credibility as a quasi-public institution.

And I gather their slow and so far lame response casts considerable doubt on that. Especially since the attack, by whomever, exploits weaknesses many here have pointed out they shouldn’t have.

Maybe it’s different for novels, I don’t know.  But in my experience, the rankings do not always correlate with sales.

Yeah LauraB, a lot of that kind of user ranking schemes seem like a total waste of time to me. Who cares how highly a given book is rated by the group of random people who have enough time on their hands to care about this stuff? To be honest I don’t particularly want to know what others think about a given book, most of the time.

Mark, what do you think of the response I got about 1½ hours ago? ↑

I don’t think they sound apologetic at all.  Firstly, people who are apologetic usually bother to issue at least a vague namby pamby apology (“we’re sorry to those who were inconvenienced”, for instance).  Amazon has not.

Also, there’s something about what he says about Gay & Lesbian titles that makes me suspicious that he’s trying to downplay what really happened.  Because every other category he mentions is a category often intersected with Gay & Lesbian issues.  They really, really want it to not be a homophobia thing.  And while I’m not sure it’s deliberately homophobic, obscuring what really happened is just all around shitty.

All I can say is that I still have a bad taste in my mouth about this, and I probably won’t be shopping at Amazon for a while.  At least until I’m sure everything is fully reinstated.

Opoponax, you have a good point. It’s quite possible that what happened involved an exploit or a mole. A bad actor, like Gracchus said.

I still feel angry about it too. I guess I just mean, this response is better than the ones people have gotten so far.

I’m not getting “apologetic,” so much as “irritable, crabby, and defensive.” We’ll get your damn pervert books back on the product search soon, you damn queers, so shut up and let us figure out what the hell to do about this.

Mark Foxwell:

They’re griefers. Causing trouble is the whole point; the psychology is probably something akin to bullying.

junk science:

I’m curious what form letter you’re reading. Does it have to be phrased a certain way to qualify as an admission of fault? “Embarrassing and ham-fisted” is something of an understatement, but it certainly sounds like they’re saying they did something wrong.

Opoponax,  I can see why you are in NYC.  Northwest people are just too ... too ... not up to YOUR standards for you.

That’s okay though.  They will live longer on average. You can continue with your fantasy world where nobody leaves for a holiday or where “out of town” is three cities over.  That isn’t how the northwest works, given the doubling of the population in the last twenty years because people like to live and work there.  Just remind me never to work for you, ‘kay.  Somehow, I think you’d get all childfree on the first person who needed to take care of a sick child or take their mother to the dentist.

Atheist et al:

I am still boggling over their using such “unprofessional” language as “ham-fisted.”

Perhaps they used such a colloquialism to distract from their waffling? It pretty much worked on me the first read…

Sorry folks, I have only minutes before I need to get to bed to get to work at 6.

(Some of you may recall me whining a month or so back about being cut back to 7 hours a day—since then, we’ve done a complete volte-face with mandatory 9 or even 10 hour days, 5 or six mandatory hours on Saturdays half the time, plus offers of voluntary 5 hours on Sunday a couple weeks back and voluntary Saturdays. I took all the voluntary hours, but this “show up at six” thing this week is mandatory. Crazy, I tell ya.

Plus I just spent the past couple hours filing taxes on line—it’s complicated because I worked a month and a half last year in California so I had to file there too, plus I am claiming credit for my student loan interest payments, which I actually made in excess of the cap for claiming.

So I haven’t given this Pandagon stuff much time since I last posted, and have essentially none left until tomorrow.

Oh well, at least now the IRS owes me instead of vice versa. And I get all 65 dollars California withheld last year back! Whee!

So—Amazon. I haven’t been buying much of anything these past few years, and I wasn’t planning a big spree anywhere anyway. I’m gonna start citing books via actual public institutions or the publisher, anyway, just on principle.

I don’t think Amazon is malicious, for a capitalist operation. But they are what Harlan Ellison, back in his better days (or anyway days with lower standards; he’s still the same dude) called “scuttlefish.”

Laid back West Coast scuttlefish.

Not all that different than me, to be sure. Except I’d be very mad indeed at anyone who tried to make me look more homophobic than perhaps I still might actually be, despite my resolve not to be. (I don’t think I’m homophobic at all, but I imagine there might be some unexamined privilege issues still waiting to show themselves lurking around my psyche…)

If I were a big operation like Amazon—catch the scum and send ‘em to jail mad.

It takes a lot to make me wish our penal system on anyone. But idjits like “weev” and whoever may actually have done it deserve it—the former even if he didn’t, for being the kind of douche who pretends he would.

And I’d be very apologetic for letting it happen, even if it was someone else’s malice.

Okay, just rambling now—it’s what I do…

G’night!

Mark, good luck with those heavy hours. Jeez that sounds pretty bad. Hope the change up again.

Also, may I just state, as a Midwesterner, that the whole East Coast vs. West Coast thing is sorta weird to me? You both have a point, you see matters a little differently—why not just leave it at that?

If my boyfriend that was supporting me dumped me, I too, would be livid about them putting my book, the only income I have, on the weirdo list.

On the other hand, they have a point.

Athiest ~

As a (land-locked) northeasterner, I tend to find the Coast v. Coast pissing contests completely incomprehensible, too. In other words: jeez, you two. What the Hell crawled up your asses and died? Give it a rest already.

I will also cop to being a battle-scarred veteran of the LiveJournal/6A v. the Not Precisely Organized Ranks of Fandom brouhaha that has become known as Strikethrough/Boldthrough (OFFS, Fandom!/Attempted Calm Voice of Reason Division). And I have to admit: Strikethrough/Boldthrough being the end result of a massive meta-troll causes the entire thing to make way, way more sense than it did at the time or even in somewhat calmer retrospect. This whole situation with Amazon is basically contoured in exactly the same way: establish the existence of an exploitable weakness in the system (in both cases, the ability of users to flag content as inappropriate, triggering a fairly automated response), test the extent to which that weakness can effect the system (hitting individual authors as early as February in the case of Amazon; hitting individual fannish posters prior to the mass community-based complaint attacks in the case of LJ), CRY HAVOC AND LET SLIP THE DOGS OF WAR in a massive coordinated attack using voluntary and involuntary actors, sit back and sip mojitos while the internet flips its shit in response to your brilliance. Strikethrough/Boldthrough was the Amazon GLBT attack in a smaller scale—it even appeared to primarily target slash-oriented communities, generating furious denials of homophobic sentiment from LJ/6A that went largely unbelieved by the denizens of LJ at large. The primary difference is that, in the case of Strikethrough/Boldthrough, the individuals and communities targeted *had no way of knowing* they were targeted until LJ/6A dropped the banhammer on them—the anonymous nature of LJ’s complaint-generating system, and LJ/6A’s own terrible record when it came to communicating with its customer base, produced a massive shitstorm of self-perpetuating outrage. In this case, the outrage-generating mechanism *relied* on people noticing something bad going down and leaping directly to a conclusion based on fury—Amazon turning out to have asstacular communication skills is just icing on the cake.

Northwest people are just too ... too ... not up to YOUR standards for you.

I don’t think that’s the case at all.

I just think that all people, wherever they live on this planet, should try to do their job to the best of their abilities.  And if you live in a place where the majority of your customers are going to be up and doing business several hours ahead of you, generally it behooves you to wake up a little earlier than you normally would when a huge catastrophe happens.  I used to work on film productions which were partially based here in the states and partially based in India.  If there was a problem in India, I had to answer my phone even if it was 4am in New York.  If something needed to be taken care of by start-of-day in Mumbai, that was what needed to happen.  Even if “start-of-day Mumbai” is 10pm Eastern Time.  There was no such thing as the team in India sitting on their thumbs for a whole day because “waaaaah, I’m only 3 hours into my workday!  It was a holiday weekend!  I ate too much candy!  I’ve got a case of the Mondays!”

When you run an e-commerce business, you can’t assume that A) the world runs on your schedule or B) all your customers live local to you.  That very understanding is why companies like Amazon succeeded over bricks and mortar competitors a decade or so ago.

Oh and re the “remind me never to work for you” jab.

I spent a lot of time working a service industry job (retail, if you want to be specific).  Do you know how many long holiday weekends I got? Zero. Ever. Period.  We were open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I worked every Easter Sunday.  I was in the day after Thanksgiving every year.  I’ve also worked many a Christmas Eve. 

And we had it DAMN FUCKING GOOD compared to people who work lower-level service industry jobs like supermarkets, restaurants, convenience stores, and the like.  I don’t think my brother and his fiancee have ever spent a Thanksgiving or a Christmas together (and if either of them can wrangle a whole major holiday off, they can kiss goodbye to having either the night before or the morning after off, too, let alone making time for travel).  He works at Starbucks.  She works at Walgreens.  C’est la vie.

So you’ll pardon me if I don’t have even the teensiest lick of sympathy for the poor poor megacorporate execs who might have to move the easter egg hunt to after lunch because they need to take a conference call and send out a few emails due to their company crashing and burning before their eyes.

So nobody ever gets a dentist appointment or an unapproved day off, and you think that is okay. 

I hear Linda Hirshman is hiring people who think having a life that isn’t work is the only way to be professional.

I don’t think it’s OK, Ms Kate.  I think it’s the way of the world for a very large number of Americans, and thus I’m not really losing any sleep over the idea that someone who makes a seven figure salary might have to come in a little early one morning or change their travel plans or not be with their family for an hour or two on one holiday, once.  Because the folks with the seven figure salaries don’t seem to be losing any sleep over the fact that my brother and his fiancee have never spent Christmas together because they have to serve lattes and restock anti-wrinkle cream.