HiddenMysteries.com
HiddenMysteries.net
HiddenMysteries.org



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A word from our sponsor

   

Amazon.com : Your Mind Controlling Corporate Censor!

Tuesday, April 14 2009 @ 09:50 AM CDT

Increase font    Decrease font
This option not available all articles

Forget those litte things called Bill of Rights... Amazon.com has!!!

Amazon.com Provokes LGBT Firestorm

by Deanna Zandt

How social media instantly jumped into the fray to help LGBT and feminist books on Amazon.com.

Over the holiday weekend, a firestorm let loose on the Internet: For no apparent reason, books on Amazon.com with feminist, LGBT and sexual-empowerment themes were removed from the sales rankings, numbers that show how well a product is performing on the website.

Angry authors and readers responded by launching a full-on social media assault, using blogs, Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness and to collect signatures on a petition.

Rapid response campaigns not affiliated with any one organization are increasingly becoming the norm in the age of free communication tools. The Amazon incident (dubbed “AmazonFAIL,” drawing on usage of “fail” as an indicator of strong disapproval in online cultures) is a fascinating example in part because of the cultural motivation behind and the mechanics of the removal and the implications for sales of “banned” books.

For those just waking up to the scandal, here’s what happened: Amazon has a policy of removing books labeled as “adult” from its sales rankings (which by itself could discourage sales). This, in turn, has a ripple effect of removing books from elsewhere on the site, such as in search results and “related books” listings. The Amazon system is proprietary, so it’s hard for outsiders to determine the full implications of such a removal. Anecdotal evidence from authors searching for their banned books returned wildly different results at different points over the weekend, but it was clear that if allowed to go unchecked, the “adult” label would have a severe impact on sales—if the readers can’t find it, the readers can't buy it.

What kinds of books received this “adult” label? Erotica with gay themes (but not heterosexual themes), rape survivor advocacy and rape culture criticism, and feminist missives were among those suddenly labeled adult material. Soft-core hetero porn (such as Playboy centerfold calendars), hetero-themed sex toys and anti-gay screeds were left untouched. Let the maelstrom begin.

Blog posts sprang up, but the social media service Twitter soon became the hotbed of information gathering and disseminating. Authors tweeted about missing books, readers posted links to breaking news and why-would-Amazon-do-this theories, and a petition demanding that Amazon rescind its adult policy gathered 10,000 names in less than 24 hours. By Sunday evening, Amazon responded via an interview with Publisher’s Weekly that the entire situation was a “glitch.”

As most in the social media sphere attacked Amazon directly for purposely removing the books, technologists familiar with "distributed attacks" (attacks that are carried out by people not belonging to any one identifiable, formal group) started to speculate on the source of the takedowns. They understood that it's unlikely that Amazon itself enacted a homophobic, misogynist campaign to selectively label certain books as adult and thus damage the sales of these books.

Blogger Dely at livejournal.com explains:

Now, let's just put ourselves in Amazon's shoes. Keep in mind that Amazon is a smug, fairly liberal company headquartered in f****** Seattle of all places and, last I checked, Jeff Bezos is not exactly a Christian fundamentalist. Why on earth would they suddenly censor only a specific group of content that deals with a marginalized and politically active community? Why would this policy change not take the form of a specific policy, but rather of very discriminately flagging only certain titles as "adult" content? Why would this happen over a weekend?

It's obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as "adult" after too many people have complained about it. It's also obvious that there aren't too many people using this feature, as indicated by the easy availability (and search ranking) of pornography and sex toys and other seemingly "objectionable" materials, otherwise almost all of those items would have been flagged by this point. So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find.

It’s far more likely that a group of tech “enthusiasts,” let’s call them, organized some sort of campaign over a holiday weekend (when Amazon was likely operating with a shoestring staff) to delist books they found objectionable. When I say enthusiasts, I’m referring to loosely associated hacker-types who enjoy wreaking havoc purely for the sake of the havoc. Rarely do they have a formal political agenda. Often women, particularly feminists, and queer folk are the targets (though recently, one notorious group called 4chan targeted and found a teenager who had posted a video of himself torturing a cat).

It would be easy to dismiss this, and other cases, as Internet-gone-wild making the world unsafe for women and LGBT folk. Somewhat harder to discern, and admit to ourselves, is that the anonymity and freedom that the Internet provides pulls back the curtain on our culture: at work are the illusive mores of misogyny and homophobia that continue to shape our culture and lives.

BUY BOOKS HERE: WE DON'T GIVE A DAMN WHAT YOU READ!!!
http://www.HiddenMysteries.com


***************************************

More on AmazonFAIL: Hackers, Misogyny, Homophobia and You

This is the kind of story that sends me down the rabbit hole of musing for days.
As the day has worn on, more parts of the story are unfolding, and all these little tidbits at the intersection of tech, culture, media and commerce are more than fascinating. This is the kind of story that sends me down the rabbit hole of musing for days.

Let's start with the tech side of things

According to Jessica Valenti (and her publisher, Seal Press), Amazon reps are claiming that this is a purely internal issue caused by the mysterious "glitch" spoken of last night. I don't think the reps know what they're talking about, frankly. What I think is going on: there is a severe vulnerability in the Amazon flagging-for-inappropriate system, and it's been found and exploited by one or more nerds with too much time on their hands. Amazon's mistake, vis a vis the brave new world of social media, is two-fold:

Refusing to acknowledge a vulnerability. People are reaching the point not just that they like transparency in dealing with people who hold lots of important info on their behalf, but they are coming to demand it. Amazon's "nothing more to see here" approach is damaging to the relationship they have with those outraged by the exploit.

Refusing to acknowledge the pain of affected people. If you have an entire relationship built on trust (with personal info, with commitments to move products, with referrals and wishlists, etc), you have the obligation to have that uncomfortable sit-down when a betrayal is introduced to the relationship. Amazon hasn't done that yet. Yikes.

There's a livejournal blogger out there now claiming responsibility for the exploit. I won't link over, because I actually think he's full of crap, as do those who've attempted to reproduce his exploitative code. It's a well known practice for those with no skillz to take responsibility for things they have no part of to build up their hacker cred. Please. You know what tipped me off, for the record? The references to wanting to have anonymous sex with women and heroin from Craigslist. Fetishy-objectifying of women is common in the hacker community, for sure, but this guy is just… silly.

This doesn't mean that someone didn't come up with something similar– I'm almost positive they did. Which means that Amazon has a serious problem, and they better have a better explanation than the "glitch."

There's a bigger picture here: cultural implications

From a tech point of view, recommendation systems and flag-as-inappropriate tools that aren't built to handle gaming the system are just no good. It's unacceptable that a masterminding giant such as Amazon wasn't prepared for this kind of attack. Especially considering how much it affects Amazon's contract and relationship with the people that provide them with the goods its users demand, and how much users trust Amazon to do the Right Thing.

On a wider cultural scale, as I'd mentioned in the article in the WMC, the cultural implications of these attacks — especially when it's big enough to get this kind of attention — are huge. Geek culture is one of the last vestiges of an overtly sexist and toxic environment for anyone who's not a straight guy, most likely white and middle-class. (Not limited to the nerds of computer love, either– check out this post on misogyny and comic books from Amptoons.) When these attacks occur, it reveals not just the hatred that the hackers themselves have for women and LGBT folk, but the wider cultural intolerance we still have running rampant.

Decades of victories in civil rights for women and people of color, and more recently, LGBT folk seeking rights to get married, cannot correct the thousands of years of damage on which our culture is built. When a system of rapid information distribution (oh, like say, The Internet!) provides anonymity, free(-ish) speech and very little accountability, it makes it easy for people's True Feelings to come out. It's my feeling that what we see online is a mirror showing us the dark underbelly of what exists.

Some would react by clamping on the anonymity, the level of free speech and the accountability, often all at once. Sure, keeping trolls off your comments section is probably a good idea. Enacting laws making it impossible to operate independently and anonymously online? Bad idea. Very bad. We need to be addressing the root causes of our misogyny, our racism, our homophobia — not piling on bandaids, duct tape and bailing twine to keep people's mouths shut. Only when it came to the threat of physical danger would I advocate for restriction. I have witnessed friends and colleagues being attacked viciously, and there is no one on this planet that deserves that level of fear stuffed down their throats.

It's time to get real, folks. These attacks are proof that feminism and its partners in other social justice work still have a long, long way to go. Long way. I'm on board… are you?


http://www.alternet.org/

Comments (0)




* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A word from our sponsor

   


HiddenMysteries
Main Headlines Page

Main Article Page
Amazon.com : Your Mind Controlling Corporate Censor!
http://www.hiddenmysteries.net/newz/article.php/20090413222826887

Check out these other Fine TGS sites

HiddenMysteries.com
HiddenMysteries.net
HiddenMysteries.org
RadioFreeTexas.org
TexasNationalPress.com
TGSPublishing.com
ReptilianAgenda.com
NationofTexas.com
Texas Nationalist Movement