goddamnit, Amazon

In a nutshell, Amazon.com recently (like this past week?) classified a bunch of gay-themed books as "adult" and therefore stripped them of their sales rankings and prevented them from coming up in some searches. Some of these books are actually adult but a lot of them are not. Hetero romance novels remain NOT classified as adult. Because everyone knows gay people are inherently all sexual and inappropriate and whatnot.

This same idea played a huge part in the Yes on 8 campaign: "if we don't force gay people back into the closet, your kids might find out they exist! And then you'll have to EXPLAIN things! To YOUR CHILDREN! And you hate talking to your children! Accurate information about humans makes baby Jesus cry."

Anyway, I sent an e-mail to Amazon and I don't really have the energy to talk about it any more right now. I'm just going to link to springheel_jack because he has a bunch of good links.

an interesting theory but there's still a problem

http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html posits that Amazonfail is most likely the result of Epic Trolling, not an employee deciding to change the policy, and they say Strikethrough2007 was another example of this.

The problem is it's still not just the trolls who are responsible; SixApart (and possibly Amazon?) still made the decision to ban/censor things that shouldn't have been banned/censored. And Amazon's reps lied at some point - either "Ashlyn D" lied and it really was a "glitch," or she was telling the truth and now they're lying about it being unintentional.

...I was going to say "it would be different if users could create their own tags and a bunch of people inaccurately tagged hundreds of books in order to get them classified as 'adult'" but apparently you can create your own tags. (I thought I'd better check before I said it.) But still, the choices are:

1. Tagging hundreds of books, which Amazon wouldn't notice until people complained (which some authors have been doing since February) and when they noticed they'd probably fix it.

Or 2. convincing someone at Amazon to make the change, and Member Services is aware of the policy and defends it when questioned.

I'm pretty sure all the evidence points to 2.

Bottom line, I don't care whether Amazon was motivated by actual homophobes or anarchic, we-don't-care-who-we-offend trolls; Amazon thought it was OK to send everyone the message that gay equals pornographic and that is not OK.