Amazon ‘glitch’ stirs rumors of alleged censorship
The news about Amazon’s ‘glitch’ that has resulted in thousands of titles being removed from its ranking system has really spread around the internet like wildfire.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story, thousands of titles, dealing mostly with gay and lesbian themes, were removed from Amazon’s ranking system. This basically means none of those titles will show up on bestseller lists, "Amazon Recommends" lists, and pretty much everything else. In other words, you won’t find those titles unless you specifically search for them.
Amazon says it’s nothing more than a glitch that they are working to fix. Many on the intertubes, however, are pretty sure it’s a conspiracy by Amazon to censor what we read.
I don’t know who I believe at this point. I’m going to wait this out and see what happens. If it really is a glitch, as Amazon maintains, then everything should be back to normal fairly quickly and life goes on. If not, then there’s the serious matter of censorship to deal with.
And since I obviously serve up Amazon ads on this blog, and make a commission off any sales from those ads, I will be following this very closely. If you have read my blog at all, then you know I have zero tolerance for censorship. And if Amazon is up to no good, then I will pull those ads and close down my affiliate account.
But I don’t want to make any hasty decisions. Stuff tends to get blown way out of proportion on the internet and sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between fact and fiction. Hopefully in this case, cooler heads will prevail.
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A very good mantra to live by is “never attribute to malice what could be done by incompetence.” Kind of like Occam’s Razon, only with people’s motivation.
This very easily could have been a programming bug where one particular category of books wasn’t picked up in the rankings. In order for someone to willfully exclude it, it would take an orchestrated effort across many people and department to get a feature like that into production without the QA department picking up on it.
The easiest solution is probably the answer: someone screwed up. No malice intended.