Update: Was Amazon a victim of ‘mob mentality’ after computer glitch?

The glitch that caused Amazon’s website to pull many ‘adult oriented’ books (mostly gay & lesbian titles) from its sales rankings, causing the books to be harder to find, caused quite a controversy last week. I detailed it in this post Amazon ‘glitch’ stirs rumors of alleged censorship (April 14).

While the question of whether or not Amazon engaged in deliberate censorship because of homophobic tendencies is still up in the air, the fierce and harsh response to the incident on blogs and Twitter brings up other questions. Were people too quick to judge? Was there a ‘mob mentality’ in the online community?

These questions, and more, were brought up in this NYT article:

Although the way messages speed across social networks makes today’s digital world ripe for mob-fueled conspiracy theories, the controversy over Amazon was striking both for its ferocity and for the velocity with which it spread.

And at least one blogger, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University, backtracked on his criticism of Amazon:

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"I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true," Mr. Shirky wrote, noting that "the idea that this was an event of mainly technological propagation, rather than a coordinated bit of anti-gay bias, simply escaped me."

Certainly stories like this show how technology can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have a massive social network in place that gives ordinary people a lot of power. On the other hand, you risk that mob mentality, where people jump to conclusions not based on facts, but rather on rumors and even the biases from their peers.

The storm surrounding Amazon has calmed since this story first broke last week. But I think the jury is still out on exactly what went wrong – mostly due to Amazon being fairly tight-lipped about the whole thing. From what I have read, the ‘glitch’ has been fixed and I haven’t heard of certain adult-themed titles being banished from their sales rankings.

Again, as I said in my first post about this subject, I hope cooler heads prevail!

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