Apr 14, 2009
Spreading like wildfire: Twitter, Amazon and the social media mob
The trouble with wildfire is, well, it spreads. Quickly. And uncontrollably. With dangerous consequences.
On the day I arrived in Australia earlier this year, the country was reeling from the loss of whole communities in the state of Victoria which had been decimated by raging bushfires which, kindled by a gruelling midsummer heatwave (which hit 46°C), had swept through townships on the outskirts of Melbourne leaving nothing but the blackened ribs of buildings and cars smouldering in their path.
Scores of people died, along with several million native animals.
As someone from a (thankfully) bushfire-free country, it’s all-too-easy to read about situations like this and wonder why people don’t just run away – until you realise a crucial fact: wildfire runs quicker than you.
In forests and dense undergrowth, the frontline can advance at a rapid walking pace (10-20km/hr) but across open farmland and urged on by a following wind, in some cases it can advance at 80-100km/hour – that’s the length of a football field in a matter of seconds. Twisty turny country roads and raining embers slow down those trying to escape, if they managed to even reach their cars at all.
Hitting temperatures of up to 1000°C, the radiant heat from the racing wall of fire destroys everything before the flames even get close.
The best advice for those who choose to stay and defend their property, is to put out spot fires as long as possible, then find somewhere safe that won’t burn – usually inside a building, and wait until the front passes over – less than ten minutes, in many cases. But that will likely be the longest ten minutes of your life.
So even though they can be survivable, wildfires are dangerous and the fact that they spread so, quickly, virulently and unpredictably makes them worthy of suspicion and careful regard.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the internet.
This weekend, something happened to the Amazon sales rank infrastructure which meant that lots of (fiction & non fiction) books which it had classified as adult, erotic or about sexuality suddenly had their sales rankings zapped.
Cue mass public suspicious blamestorming, name-calling and moral outrage, fuelled in no small part by Twitter.
Some of the kvetching was justified: certain books were harder (but not impossible) to find – which must be frustrating if you’re an author trying to sell books in those categories – plus the changes seemed to be applied inconsistently across the service (viz. a Playboy centrefold photo book retaining its sales rank, while Stephen Fry’s tender and gently rollicking (but not steamy in the slightest) autobiography lost its statistic. Weird.)
Some was not particularly justified, and just plain knee-jerk overreaction: “This is outright censorship!” people frothed. “Amazon have a homophobic policy!” “Let’s googlebomb them,” cried others, “I can’t wait to see them squirm!” “Boycott them!” “Book nazis!” “Why is Amazon removing the sales rankings from gay. lesbian books?”
That’s a big leap – making an assumption that it was a deliberate and malicious attempt to suppress a particular kind of literary work, or to discriminate against particular authors. And we all know what happens when you assume things.
It’s worth remembering Hanlon’s razor here:
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
(as mentioned by at least one Twitter user)
Now, it’s still not completely clear what happened, or why – and doubtless there’ll be repercussive rumbling and grumbling about this online for some time to come, until the full story is revealed – if it ever is.
(Though whether it should be Amazon’s responsibility to submit to public interrogation of their software release practices and allow a public hue and cry to take place is another question entirely – but let’s gloss over that for now.)
But for now, it seems to be a cock-up (no pun intended) which has been/is being rectified.
Anyone who’s ever worked in big complex technology organisations knows that stuff like this happens, and that 99.9% of the time, it’s because someone didn’t test something, or didn’t think that X schema would affect Y, or one bit of the business (the bit that handles the doohickeys) failed to consult another bit (the bit that slams the whammer) which meant some small, key issue was overlooked.
That doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, obviously, but it does mean that – as Occam and common sense instruct – the simplest explanation for some phenomenon is more likely to be accurate than more complicated explanations.
Sometimes, stuff fucks up.
Usually, no-one outside of technology knows about it.
Mostly, it gets fixed.
But as explanations go, it’s not as sexy or controversial or worth spreading as an explanation which includes the board of Amazon in a photo line-up for next year’s annual report, all wearing neon comic sans “We hate teh gayz” badges, though, is it?
FWIW, I think that what happened can be explained thus:
the implementation of a tweak to the discovery algorithm (rather than an actual homophobic policy – perhaps they were creating a safe search equivalent, or something similar) which had unintentional and widespread knock-on effects
+
an unhelpful interaction with an underinformed customer help exec (they do tend to throw phrases like “policy” around all the time because it’s opaque and mysterious enough to make most people shut up – unfortunately, it tends to enrage those persistent enough to care)
+
an unhealthy dose of internet hysteria (lots of uninformed supposition and conclusion leaping and twitter stoking indignation and crowd-think behaviour)
+
a lack of response from Amazon on the issue (it was a holiday weekend, which meant any “official” information was patchy at best: the only bit of official communication which people could reference in the middle of all the hysteria was that customer help rep, referring to adult content policy, above. The internet mob abhors a vacuum.)
=
one giant, ugly, rabid conspiracy
In classic internet style, the voices of the Twittering community – so keen to call Amazon homophobic or start an immediate boycott or googlebomb just 36 hours ago – aren’t apologising for misunderstanding, or admitting they were wrong to lump a fairly liberal internet bookseller (which, let’s remember, still stocks all sorts of literature to cater for every persuasion) in with the Nazis.
Instead, they’re pouring suspicion and scorn on the explanation, criticising Amazon for not fixing the problem, or allowing it to happen, or speaking up earlier – essentially, blaming Amazon for all their hysteria.
It’s yet to be seen how Amazon publicly react to this particular public relations shitstorm in the long run – and they have doubtless learned a big lesson in being more responsive to PR issues, but one thing has become abundantly clear – even lauded and applauded in some sectors, without irony: that social media tools like Twitter and the like can quickly transform “the wisdom of crowds” (which Amazon has spent so much time and effort tapping into, with its collaborative filtering algorithms) into an astonishing display of “people power” (a good thing, when applied appropriately, and the internet is a powerful tool for organising and expressing precisely that)…but something that can all-too-easily can turn into “the baying of the mob”.
Amazon may come out of this looking a little bedraggled, but I can’t help feeling that the social media mob isn’t coming out of this smelling of roses. The kind of ugly, prejudiced, underinformed, sneery, rude, kneejerk activity we saw over this weekend on Twitter and around the web makes me concerned, not proud, about the potential of social technologies.
They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But a little information, misassumed, miscommunicated and fuelled by internet attention and sneery schadenfreude (or whatever the opposite of goodwill is), can also spark a wildfire.
Destructive. Damaging. Virulent. Unapologetic. Unrelenting.
Well said. I don’t have much more to add, really, other than that I allowed the whole mess to sail over my head. It’s just easier that way. In fact, protip: It’s always worth waiting 2 days for all the facts to come to light.
This made me think of CNN, or any 24 hour news channel, when there is a breaking story, the same 5 minuscule pieces of information get reported ad nauseam. There is no value in waiting to get the full complete story, in-depth journalism/research. The value is in being first not correct or accurate!
All fine and dandy, but you left out one crucial part of the equation. That is at least one gay author of a gay-themed (but not erotic or “adult”) was told by Amazon that his book had lost it’s sales ranking due to policy enacted by Amazon. The actual quote was, “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists.”
So had books of every kind lost their sales ranking, no big deal. It’s a glitch; they’ll fix it. But that the titles were LARGELY gay and lesbian, and coupled with the statement FROM AMAZON that stated, in effect, that gay/lesbian authors and their books were deemed to be “adult” content. Do the LOGICAL math.
Amazon is at fault in both counts. Was it a glitch? Maybe. It makes it a little harder to believe that when authors were notified in February that their sales rankings were removed due to a new “adult materials” policy.
Report everything if you’re going to have an intelligent comment on the situation.
I’m inclined to disbelieve Amazon’s cock-up explanation. I don’t pretend to know what happened exactly, but in the circumstances I reckong the ‘glitch’ thing is too glib.
Although the shitstorm occurred over the Easter weekend, something had already been going on for several weeks. The first time an Amazon employee responded to a gay author’s query (about his ranking being removed) with an explanation that this was ‘policy’ was in February. Took a while for this information to filter out into the public arena, but it was going on before then.
The part of Amazon’s explanation that made me grin was some company voice blaming a technician in France. Obviously the company guy’s audience is American, so that’s a fairly safe thing to say. But we in Europe who watched the event over the weekend know that this glitch/cock-up/policy/whatever seemed to affect only the American site. In the UK we could still see gay and lesbian fiction and non-fiction, while in the USA people could see only material from the “How to prevent your child from becoming a homosexual” shelf. We could still see ‘disability and sexuality’ books, while they couldn’t.
Many regard Amazon as a market-dominating bully, and people tend to think the worst of companies like that. It’s human nature.
Chris –
Report everything? I did! I specifically referred to the interaction you mentioned:
I completely agree that the earlier “policy” statement caused confusion especially when paired with a glitch or whatever – and we’re still not sure whether there ever was such a policy. But I did mention it, above. Twice.
Thanks for commenting, though. Can I suggest that you read everything if you’re going to make an intelligent comment on this post?
David -
That’s fair enough. It may or may not have been a glitch, as you say, and they certainly handled it badly.
But my point was really about how people were very keen to leap to the most negative possible conclusion and had already started the namecalling and boycott before any information had emerged.
Yes, they did. And that’s my main point, really. People already think badly of Amazon so they’re prepared to think the worst of them as soon as something like this occurs.
This is a great post. I was startled by how quickly everyone moved to decide that Amazon was acting in bad faith, and equally, how demanding everyone was in terms of the speed of response expected from a corporation during a major holiday. Few companies could make a sensible investigation and report on it in the timescales that people seemed to be expecting.
I guess people looked at the nature of errors and wove their own meanings around it. I can totally understand the annoyance of the authors who found their books dropping off the system; and there is also a residual fear about the maintenance of gay rights that exists in the USA as states like California have overturned previously liberal pronouncements. Censorship was a ready meaning that could be read into those actions, even if it made little sense.
I wonder too if humans prefer an answer that involves purpose and agency (the desire to blame someone) rather than human error.
The internet makes me weary at times. Sure, it’s a liberal mob much of the time; but it’s still a mob.
*still thinking*
The biggest issue to explain is the email to the author from customer services. If the story about the French programmer misunderstanding ‘sexuality’ is correct then somehow these items got labelled as adult/fwoar-not-safe-search (mind you, apparently Amazon sells all sorts of hot’n'heavy stuff and it has sales ranks appended) and propagated through the database. That’s an error, not a policy, though…
Or perhaps they are evil.
…The thing is, it’s quite fun to speculate, but no one really has a clue. FWIW: the original author who complained, Mark Probst, says in am interesting follow-up post that he accepts it was a mistake. http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15507.html
Welcome to the ugly side of the “real time web” that so many are currently promoting. I think it will get worse before it gets better.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that it will take the baying mob driving someone to suicide before people start to stop and think.
A “glitch” that _just happened_ to affect specifically gay and lesbian publications, with assorted staffers confirming it, and history going back before this, merely not as widespread, is the simplest explanation? I would say no. Possible, certainly, if one stretches, but dubious.
Note that nothing that Amazon have said has actually provided any evidence, just reversed said policy and been a bit more verbose than “glitch” i.e. “a French guy did it and ran away”.
But Ordinal, it didn’t just affect gay and lesbian publications – other adult/erotica titles were also affected.
I’m not trying to justify what Amazon said, or did, by any stretch – we may never get to the bottom of what actually happened and why. But without knowing for sure, is it appropriate for the massed voices of Twitter to start throwing accusations? Prejudice, much? Maybe, maybe not.
Were they? Really? Were there lots of hetero products delisted suddenly as well?
What were they? I’m curious.
I don’t have a full list, obviously, but Girl With a One Track Mind’s (erotic, hetero memoir) was among the affected titles (the sales rank has returned now).
Seems odd that she’d be singled out if it was otherwise an entirely gay thing – which makes it more likely that it was to do with how they were classified (ie not gay etc, but under “sexuality”).
This article has a useful illustration:
I think GWAOTM had the same issue in the UK/US.
Not all books removed had a “gay” tag; not all books with a “gay” tag were removed.
The number of complaints of removals of those with “gay” tags and content (which were not porn) far, far outweights the number of complaints of removals of those without one (which were not porn). I don’t recall any guides to being a straight teenager being removed from search results, for instance.
I KNEW someone would come along and say everything I thought and felt with greater skill than I could muster. Thank God for the internet.
The whole #amazonfail thing is an embarrassment, and even more so considering how many are now hailing it as some kind of triumph of popular will. Not to be too vicious, but I imagine a lot of lynch mobs patted themselves on the backs after the hanging was done, too.
You’re right that calling Amazon “Nazis” was extreme, and maybe googlebombing them was, as well, but as a queer person and a feminist (and there was good evidence that those were the kinds of books *most* affected–there were plenty of definitely erotic hetero books that weren’t affected, as well as all the anti-gay stuff that showed up on a search for “homosexual”) I feel like my anger was justified. LGBT people are censored in a lot of contexts, so assuming that this was censorship by Amazon wasn’t that big of a leap, and it’s clear from Amazon’s treatment to Craig Seymour when he wrote in a while back that being polite isn’t especially useful–it was the anger that got them working to re-list affected books as quickly as they did, which minimized some of the damage. And the fact is that their “glitch” hurt the sales of thousands of authors and they never issued any kind of sincere apology. It’s not that we *want* to accuse Amazon of “hating teh gayz”, it’s that in this society, “hating teh gayz” isn’t actually that uncommon, and we want to make it clear that it’s unacceptable.
Chris: Think of the context. You have a customer service rep who’s looking at a screen, with an author talking to him asking why his book no longer has sales rank.
The CSR sees that it’s been marked as Adult. He tells the author that his book has been marked as adult, and that it’s company policy that such books are removed from search listings. This is all just a stock script that they will have been trained to do.
The CSR doesn’t know anything more than that a book has been marked as adult, it’s author has asked about it, and he’s given them the stock, correct response about adult titles. He doesn’t know why it’s been marked thus – he didn’t mark it. He doesn’t know if there’s been any kind of change of policy, because he’s not involved in that. He’s just a CSR, looking at a screen and replying honestly according to the facts he sees.
Which is more likely: that one of Amazon’s thousands of CSRs is reacting by script to what he’s reading on screen, or that Amazon’s thousands of CSRs are aware of a new policy to suppress lesbian and gay books – but that the memo they all got about it has somehow magically not leaked, despite a decent proportion of those CSRs also being lesbian or gay?
Between action and reaction, there is a space for thought. That’s the moment of choice: the point at which we can all think for ourselves about what circumstances might mean. The problem is that the urge to pass on bad news overrides our urge to think about something. And this is a clear case where that’s happened.
Ordinal: Your first comment is an almost-perfect example of how stories can spin out of control, because almost every one of the points you made is, in fact, wrong. I’m not blaming you for that, of course, because when lots of people you know and trust are repeating things, you believe them – that’s just the way we’re wired.
To recap: It didn’t “affect specifically gay and lesbian publications” and “specific staffers” never confirmed that fact, or anything other than books marked as adult don’t appear in search results.
This is the dark side of social networks. If people you know and trust tell you something, you are much more inclined to believe it, and less inclined to stop and think critically about what they are saying. That’s the way we’re wired: we trust our tribe to tell us that we’re in danger, or that there’s a new source of food, or that going that-a-way leads to water, and that-a-way to a nasty other tribe.
Then add in another factor: our reverance for the written word. We have a couple of thousand years of cultural history that makes us much more likely to believe something we see in text. Bibles, text books, newspapers, fake diaries of Hitler – if it’s written, we’re much more gullible about about.
Finally, add in a third factor: the impossibility of making a nuanced, balanced statement in 140 characters.
I’ll say it again: as social networks increase in influence, this is going to happen more and more, and sooner or later individuals will be physically hurt because of it. Like every village, the global one can turn from warm community to pitch-fork weilding insanity as fast as it takes someone to misread “paediatrician” as “paedophile”.
[...] no point in recapping how the “Amazon de-lists GLBT books” meme developed, because other people have done a far better job than I. But what it illustrates ably, I think, is the dark side of [...]
There was certainly hysteria, which I’m not defending, but I think there are two quite important points here which have come to light and would not have without the social web outcry.
Firstly, publishers noticed this before the hue and cry. My small publisher of partly erotic and certainly adult titles had all its books delisted without explanation in the middle of last week: http://bookkake.com/2009/04/13/on-amazonfail-another-case-study-for-the-pile/
These were not GLBT titles, simply adult ones. But had there not been a hue and cry, would I have seen their listings restored so quickly? Amazon is growing in power, and disappearing from its rankings is like disappearing from Google: your sales and income can just drop away.
Secondly, Amazon have still not answered the very pertinent question of why they see fit to lump *all* LGBT titles in as ‘adult’ books. I and many others are hugely worried that books on gay parenting, marriage, advice for young people and many other books with no ‘adult’ content were lumped in with porn of whatever stripe. This is not a simple cataloguing error, it requires intent, and prejudicious intent.
As *Amazon* increases in influence, this is going to happen more and more. I’m uncomfortable equating a consumer attack on a corporation with a witchhunt against a person. Sooner or later, people will get hurt – but they’re more likely to be gay people, particularly the young, or those living under repressive regimes, who are hurt by the persistence of this kind of stereotyping.
Ian: firstly, there was more than one independent report of that being said beyond the original post on Livejournal – and secondly, the glitch clearly did affect specifically non-”adult” gay and lesbian publications, removing them from the rankings. Amazon certainly say this. The claim is that it _also_ affected lots of other things and nobody noticed, something that of course we are now unable to check.
None of this adds up to conclusive proof, of course, that Amazon were sneakily trying to “adult”-ify said group, and I would certainly not claim as the only possible explanation; but given the context of LGBT-related material frequently being treated as “adult” in broader society, to say “Amazon, what the hell is going on here, because it looks a lot like you’re targetting gay books” seemed, and still seems, a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
James: “This is not a simple cataloguing error, it requires intent, and prejudicious intent.”
First, that’s an assumption, though, isn’t it? It’s equally-likely that, rather than a concerted campaign, it’s simply that if enough people complain about a book, it gets flagged automatically as adult. Now Amazon aren’t going to confirm that’s the case, because it’s obviously a dumb system – but people create dumb systems all the time, simply because they are quick and creating web projects is complex.
Ordinal: “firstly, there was more than one independent report of that being said beyond the original post on Livejournal”
- which is entirely consistent with what I said, and actually makes it more likely that it was a scripted response from low-level CSRs.
“the glitch clearly did affect specifically non-’adult’ gay and lesbian publications, removing them from the rankings”
- But not exclusively, which is what you – and lots of other people – said was the case.
Saying “Amazon, what the hell is going on?” is fine. But that’s not what lots of people were saying. Most people weren’t saying “let’s wait and hear what Amazon has to say”. They were saying, and Meg links to plenty of examples above, that Amazon had a new homophobic policy, that they should be boycotted, that they were nazis – all before they’d actually asked Amazon what was happening.
Asserting these things against a company or individual without waiting even a day for a response is simply wrong. Claiming that they should have responded faster is blaming the victim. Insisting that “there’s no smoke without fire” – which is what a lot of Twitterers are now effectively doing – is attempting to justify bad behaviour.
And all of those things come down to reacting before thinking.
Iain – it’s not an assumption. It’s a misconception that users can flag books on Amazon. They can flag comments, but no one but Amazon can remove products. And at some point, someone at Amazon decided that books labelled “gay” belonged in the same group as products labelled “adult”. I’m perfectly happy to accept Hanlon’s razor, but I’m equally disposed to its corollary: “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”. Amazon still needs to address this issue, and I think it’s of greater importance than a Twitterstorm over the Easter weekend.
I don’t think that anyone would disagree that it’s an issue that Amazon needs to address, but in the wider context of how social media affects people’s responses, I don’t think that’s the most important aspect of it.
As I said above (and I was quite serious) sooner or later, something like this will happen against an individual who will commit suicide because of it. Less seriously, perhaps, it will happen against a company which will suffer enough reputational damage to go bust – despite being guilty of nothing more than responding instantly on Twitter over a weekend.
Very thought-provoking post. I guess the upshot is: yes, this kind of thing is going to happen more and more often. Sometimes the mob will be right, sometimes it will be wrong. What can companies actually *do* about it faced with a hashtag swarm like this? The main thing I can think of that Amazon could have done differently is move early to make the story more boring: “Yes, this is obviously a problem. We don’t know what’s causing it. Sorry, we’ll sort it out.”
An instructive comparison is with the other big Easter Weekend twitterstorm – the Mikeyy worm. Now, we can assume Twitter users trust Twitter more than they trust most other companies, but also the company handled it pretty well: constant updates and apologies with a healthy dose of honesty about whether the problem was sorted out for good. They could have handled it better, but every situation could have been handled better w/hindsight, and the upshot was that the grumbling wasn’t directed at Twitter itself but was more ambient crossness about the situation.
*Sigh*
It was only a matter of time before Amazon had the same “baying mob” experience as Flickr (multilingual-versioning-episode) and Facebook (you’re-stealing-my-photos-episode). As Randy Quaid quoted in “The Paper” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110771/): it was just their turn. People should try to remember that not every institution is run in the same way as certain governments act, and that hell, the internet breaks sometimes because, as in all other walks of life, people make mistakes.
That’s all very measured and wise, but have you forgotten this:
http://twitter.com/megpickard/statuses/1508322185
No, I haven’t forgotten it.
It was supposed to be tongue in cheek.
I was curious to see whether those who were calling to put a hole in Amazon’s pocket would go as far as stopping twittering.
Apparently not: it got retweeted around as if it was serious.
Apologies that the irony wasn’t obvious for everyone.
It wasn’t obvious because it was well hidden. That post reads exactly as if it were serious. How is anyone but you to know the intent?
Everyone seems now to be accepting the Amazon excuse without enquiry. Perhaps they were also being ironic?
Well, it was well hidden because I had 140 characters to do it. FWIW, the first draft read “anyone who is serious about boycotting Amazon services to harm their business should also consider boycotting Twitter, since all profile images and backgrounds are stored on its S3 servers. Stopping Twittering will really show ‘em.”
But, as you say, people had no way of reading it as anything other than serious (except if they know me, in which case they might have had an inkling).
In any case, I wasn’t being serious, but you only have my word for that, so I won’t be at all offended or surprised if anyone doesn’t believe me or tries to turn it into a bit of a stick to beat me with, even though that evades the point of this blog post a bit.
As an update to this, I do recommend reading Clay Shirky’s thoughtful reflection on what he terms the failure of #amazonfail
A lot of people are very keen to accept Amazon’s excuse of a glitch, disregarding the fact that this problem wasn’t communicated to them yesterday, but more than two weeks ago. What sort of glitch affects only one type of literature etc. I can’t think why so many people are willing to cut Amazon some slack on the basis of a very flimsy and belated excuse. What’s even less understandable is why people who had doubts at the time are now so willingly taking the Chinese self-criticism route and not only wholeheartedly debasing themselves before Amazon, but also stridently attacking those who aren’t yet wholly convinced.
It’s all very odd.
Meg,
It’s interesting that you and everybody else in this thread are ignoring Nadia’s comment … you know, the one that included “as a queer person and a feminist”. Like Clay Shirky, you seem very eager to condemn LGBTs, feminists, and people with disabilities for speaking up to protest something that — regardless of intent — targeted them.
essentially, blaming Amazon for all their hysteria.
I wasn’t hysterical, and neither were most of the people I’ve talked to. It seems to me like you’re reducing the response as a whole to the people like Clay Shirky who rushed to judgment and the angriest and most skeptical responses
And in terms of blame … it’s Amazon who’s made the decision to exclude books they classify as “adult” from rankings and search results, without giving users an option. It’s Amazon who issued boilerplate responses when authors complained. It’s Amazon who dismissed it as a “glitch.” It’s Amazon who still hasn’t apologized. And it’s Amazon with a sloppy system with no checks-and-balances that can lead to 50,000 books — primarily LGBT, feminist, and disability-related — being disappeared until the outcry.
So yeah, I guess I do blame them.
jon
Jon –
You say:
…which feels very close to accusing me of being homophobic.
If you read this blogpost carefully, you’d notice that I’m not condemning LGBTs for reacting to something that affects (not targets, which does signify intent), but expressing concern at anyone who rushed to judge, condemn and call names before the facts were known.
I would hope that anyone who has been on the receiving end of such prejudiced treatment would be equally concerned.
You go on:
Then you should be congratulated for maintaining a sense of perspective and reason in the face of this emotive issue. Others weren’t so calm, and it’s their reaction that this blog post was responding to.
For the record: I think Amazon fucked up somehow, and they owe their authors (especially those affected by this issue – which includes many LGBT contributors) an explanation which clarifies how much of this was caused by technology and how much by policy or human decision-making of any kind. The email from the customer services rep in particular raises legitimate concerns which still need to be addressed.
jon:
Thank you! It seems like a lot of commenters on this whole #amazonfail situation aren’t seriously considering the impact this could have had on the communities affected, not to mention the impact that years (decades–even centuries) of *intended* censorship have *already* had on our communities. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to be ignored, and your comment comes as a breath of fresh air. I also find it telling that, as far as I can recall, I’m the first person in this thread to specifically self-identify as queer.
[...] Just Have a Glitch” which offers some contrasting thoughts and I reckon Meg Pickards’ thoughts on the issue are worth spending time with: “Amazon may come out of this looking a little bedraggled, but I [...]
[...] The concern for me is not that mistakes happened. And its not the mob internet mentality. [...]
[...] social media types. Among others, Meg Pickard, Head of Communities at Guardian Media Group, is concerned about this kind of internet-enabled hue and cry, and whether it’s doing more harm than good. Clay Shirky, new media commentator de nos jours, [...]
People weren’t too quick to judge. They did so on the stated Amazon policy by Amazon staff. I really think you underestimate that.
That the staff involved seem to be lying morons is not really anyone’s fault except Amazon’s. The whole situation is directly their fault, and the fault of the management that allowed them to screw up so badly. Nobody was being unreasonable by working on the basis that the statement of Amazon staff that it was a deliberate policy on their part was true, as you seem to be suggesting.
Phazer
[...] are two more examples of “saying it better than me”. By contrast, Meg Pickard’s Spreading like wildfire: Twitter, Amazon and the social media mob focuses on what she sees as “ugly, prejudiced, underinformed, sneery, rude, kneejerk [...]
Phazer – I take your point, absolutely, that many people were reacting to the statement from the customer care rep which – the one “fact”, if you like.
Whether that statement of policy turns out to be true or not, it’s completely understandable that people (including me!) were concerned and highly critical of it at the time, especially as the only point of official reference.
What concerned me, though, wasn’t the people responding to that statement of policy, but to the rest of it. People used phrases like “Amazon are removing books” and “Amazon are censoring books” and “Amazon are trampling on our human rights” and “Amazon are homophobic” as statements of unassailable fact, whereas the situation was still emerging, and these were assumptions or projections or imagining-the-worst-is-true at best.
Concerning? Certainly – but the public outcry went beyond reasoned concern and involved imposing sanctions and referencing nazis and censorship and words like homophobic, all of which served to whip people who hadn’t read widely about the situation – as you and many others had – into an angry frenzy.
Look, I’m not defending Amazon at all, here – as I said in a comment above, I strongly believe that they fucked up enormously in various ways which I don’t need to recount here. That much we can all agree on!
I’m just concerned about any kind of knee-jerk response which means that the real issue gets buried under hysteria, which is easy to do and makes it hard to resolve.
We should absolutely draw attention, ask difficult questions, and demand answers to legitimate concerns like whether there is or was a company policy which lumps all LGBT literature (or books by LGBT authors) into an adult category, which is inappropriate, discriminatory and frankly, idiotic, if true.
But if all Amazon see are people waving pitchforks and trying to bring them down through boycotts, shouting about how they shouldn’t target GBLT authors, then the real concern gets lost. Because Amazon can just say “Well, we didn’t target GBLT authors, so everything’s fine.”
The early policy seems to have involved separating out explicit erotica from other books. In my case, one of my books, described as “slashy” by the publisher but only metatagged as glbt and sf, didn’t appear with my other titles as of a month or so ago, and still doesn’t appear in a list of my personal better sellers. Amazon.co.uk still lists it on the second page of my titles. Amazon.com has it now as my first title if you search for my books.
The glitch wasn’t trying to put explicit erotica behind the counter; the glitch was looking at the earlier coded explicit erotica and finding the most common publisher supplied metadata to extend the paradigm without thinking about it.
I don’t think Amazon had an anti-GLBT policy; I do think they wanted to have the more explicit stuff not show up quite so openly.
Tower Books solved the problem of what to do with my Aqueduct press book by classifying it as a Regency Romance; Borders solved the problem by classifying it as literary fiction.
Since publishers are trying to promote s.f. as young adult, the metatags of glbt and sf may have gotten Amazon to take a look at the promo material and decide to keep it from my other Tor and Harper Collins books when they found the word “slashy” in the publisher’s promotion material.
Amazon still doesn’t show it as one of my personal better sellers.
Meg,
sure seems like condemnation to me. And so does the framing in your headline and through the article, analogizing the “mob” to a destructive wildfire, and concluding that they’re “Destructive. Damaging. Virulent. Unapologetic. Unrelenting.”
By contrast, I’m proud to have been a small part of #amazonfail, and grateful to those who put far more time and energy in than I did. Yeah I wish people weren’t using the word “Nazi” so much … oh well, Godwin’s Law applies on Twitter too. Still, I certainly think this should be viewed as a major success for social network activists.
Really? See James’ comment above — or Mark Probst’s initial reply from Amazon (“too bad, you lose”). Seems to me to the extent Amazon has responded, and to the extent that the deeper issues have gotten coverage, it’s been due to the high-profile activism. When was the last time that TechCrunch had a front-page article about how heteronormativity and other biases are embedded in supposedly “objective” systems? How broad had the discussion been before about Amazon’s manipulation of their rankings? And so on…
Marginalized groups including queers, feminists, people with disabilities, erotic fiction authors, independent bookstores — and their allies — banded together using social network technologies to cast the spotlight on bad behavior by a large corporation known for being unresponsive, and much deeper structural issues that are usually swept under the table. This led to a swift (albeit very imperfect) response from Amazon, and already some excellent and relatively-high-profile discussions of these deeper issues. In the process, connections have been made that may well turn into alliances and lessons have been learned.
Sounds like a good thing to me.
jon
PS: perhaps “targeted” wasn’t my best choice of words. More precisely I meant something like “primarily and disproportionally impacted as a result of an explicit action and a system with embedded discriminatory assumptions.”
By the way …
Danielle Citron’s presentation on “Destructive Crowds: New Threats to Online Reputation and Privacy” and recent article on Cyber civil rights are excellent discussions on mob effects in web 2.0 technologies. As Danielle points out, these are usually targeted at women, people of color, and members of other traditionally disadvantaged groups. Of course, there’s an important distinction between this and anti-corporate activism defending the rights of marginalized groups; I also think the dynamics of #amazonfail were somewhat different.
Daniel Solove’s “The Future of Reputation” explores some of these issues as well.
“That’s all very measured and wise, but have you forgotten this:
http://twitter.com/megpickard/statuses/1508322185”
I thought this blog post was strange considering your tweet, too. Nothing wrong with changing your mind after careful consideration, but to the non-mind reader these two posts appear contradictory.
Phazer: “They did so on the stated Amazon policy by Amazon staff.”
Yes, but here’s the issue: The “stated Amazon policy” was not that LGBT books were banned, censored, or even that they would have their sales rank removed. The “stated Amazon policy” was that books characterised as Adult would not appear in general search results. The Amazon staff involved quite simply told concerned authors that their books had been flagged as adult, and that, therefore, they would not appear in general search results.
The accusations were that Amazon had adopted a policy of banning LGBT books. That was false. Rebecca, above, hits the nail on the head: this was a classic attempt to “improve” search results (by not listing *really* adult books in search) that messed up. It wasn’t a deliberate policy.
Jon: Your evidence of actual, intentional bad behaviour is… what? I’m not seeing it. And your comments about how the results of the amazonfail debacle – getting hetronomativity on the front page of TechCrunch – seem to be veering dangerously close to saying “it doesn’t matter if Amazon was guilty, it doesn’t matter if we damaged the business of a company that just made a mistake – we made the lead on TechCrunch!”
Incidentally, I was still seeing brand new blog posts yesterday accusing Amazon of a deliberate policy of censoring GLBT literature. Are you planning to put any effort into correcting this lie? After all, you’re proud of having encouraged others to spread that lie.
Ian: The reports to which I was referring above were that people had called up Amazon or talked to reps, said “why is this gay books delisted”, and got the response “we have a policy of removing adult material from rankings”. Actually I consider it unlikely that every rank-and-file CSR in Amazon has been informed of every aspect of policy anyway – I don’t see why Amazon would be any different from any other company, where you call them up on the phone and get somebody who doesn’t really know what’s going on – so this is certainly not any sort of proof, but it _is_ something to consider, say, when deciding whether or not to mention something on one’s blog.
Ian,
Where do you see “intentional bad behavior” or “proud of encouraging others to spread lies” in my posts? Please don’t put words in my mouth.
Anyhow, reread the “in terms of blame” paragraph in my first comment. If you still don’t get it after that and want to view Amazon as the injured party here, then we view the world differently.
jon
As someone from said bushfire-afflicted country, and who watched the social phenomenon spread over the easter weekend… not just through twitter, but spreading out through other mediums… I think the comparisons are wholly justified.
but to accuse people of viewing “Amazon as the injured party” is really missing the point.
to step aside from the bushfire analogy… if you discovered that someone you worked for had embezzled several million dollars from the company, would you start telling everyone you knew to accuse them of first degree murder?
Amazon are guilty of something, yes. There are a lot of people talking about the issues, yes. But it would be nice if what the majority are talking about and what Amazon are guilty of were the same thing. It’s getting hard to draw a sensible correlation between the two, and I fear that the concerns at the end of Meg’s latest comment are coming true.
As evidenced in Rebecca Orre’s comment, they seem to be working on a not guilty verdict as a RESULT of being seen as accused of the wrong thing. And this is bad for EVERYONE.
It’s limited what we can do about that now, though. The bushfire has passed, and we’re left with smoldering stumps and blackened houses. It’s just a matter of cleaning up, rebuilding, and making sure we’re better prepared and can react more appropriately to the next threat to our way of life.
*wanders off to light a very small carefully controlled fire under a pot of stew*