Sam (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
l33tminion) wrote2009-04-13 12:02 pm
l33tminion) wrote2009-04-13 12:02 pm
Entry tags:
#AmazonFail (Troll Win?)
A sequence of events:
1. Amazon receives negative publicity for the way they handle "adult" content. Part of this comes from the usual "search for innocuous keywords on Amazon yields result page full of sex toys" links floating around the internet. Part comes from more specific issues, like when Amazon realized that one of their sellers was selling a rape simulator game only when the media was already all over it. Of course, the item was pulled and the seller had a meeting with the business end of a banhammer, but this is the sort of thing that makes Amazon very worried. Politicians love political positions with that degree of obviousness ("rape, I'm against it") and would be more than glad to paint Amazon (and video games, and the internet in general) as a villain to gain some points with the "think of the children" crowd.
2. Amazon beefs up its systems for the reporting of "adult" content.
3. Said system, probably together with Amazon's system for customer tagging of items, is abused by conservative meddlers with way too much time on their hands / disruptive hackers* / some combination of the above (maybe assisted by biased individuals within Amazon, maybe not).
4. Books featuring homosexuality are, predictably, disproportionately delisted.
5. The internet notices the above, and explodes (and explodes some more). (If a hack, the holiday weekend timing really exacerbated the damage to Amazon.)
6. Some Amazon executive's holiday weekend is unpleasantly interrupted with the news that thousands of people are suddenly very angry at Amazon. Amazon claims it's a "glitch", which it might be, sort of. (Not a software glitch (excepting security vulnerabilities that allow people's Amazon logins to be hijacked to flag items without their knowledge), but an unintended problem with the content-flagging system.) Fixing the problem could take a while, and it's likely that the bad PR will persist in the interim and beyond.
Conclusion: Will be interesting to see the post-mortem on this one. Could be that someone at Amazon was involved, but that's not necessarily (probably not?) the case. Currently, I feel sorry for Amazon.
* Edited to add: Just to be clear, I don't believe that post (believing posts by self-admitted trolls is a poor idea, see also this), but a scenario along those lines seems plausible. The same result could also have been achieved by way-too-much-time-on-their-hands people with straightforwardly bigoted motives and no technical exploits.
ETA2: Looks like Amazon's external flagging process is not automated, or so they claim. The story that's floating around now is that Amazon was using customer provided tags to flag "adult" content, but some Amazon.fr employee screwed up in terms of which tags to choose. No idea if that's accurate, though.
1. Amazon receives negative publicity for the way they handle "adult" content. Part of this comes from the usual "search for innocuous keywords on Amazon yields result page full of sex toys" links floating around the internet. Part comes from more specific issues, like when Amazon realized that one of their sellers was selling a rape simulator game only when the media was already all over it. Of course, the item was pulled and the seller had a meeting with the business end of a banhammer, but this is the sort of thing that makes Amazon very worried. Politicians love political positions with that degree of obviousness ("rape, I'm against it") and would be more than glad to paint Amazon (and video games, and the internet in general) as a villain to gain some points with the "think of the children" crowd.
2. Amazon beefs up its systems for the reporting of "adult" content.
3. Said system, probably together with Amazon's system for customer tagging of items, is abused by conservative meddlers with way too much time on their hands / disruptive hackers* / some combination of the above (maybe assisted by biased individuals within Amazon, maybe not).
4. Books featuring homosexuality are, predictably, disproportionately delisted.
5. The internet notices the above, and explodes (and explodes some more). (If a hack, the holiday weekend timing really exacerbated the damage to Amazon.)
6. Some Amazon executive's holiday weekend is unpleasantly interrupted with the news that thousands of people are suddenly very angry at Amazon. Amazon claims it's a "glitch", which it might be, sort of. (Not a software glitch (excepting security vulnerabilities that allow people's Amazon logins to be hijacked to flag items without their knowledge), but an unintended problem with the content-flagging system.) Fixing the problem could take a while, and it's likely that the bad PR will persist in the interim and beyond.
Conclusion: Will be interesting to see the post-mortem on this one. Could be that someone at Amazon was involved, but that's not necessarily (probably not?) the case. Currently, I feel sorry for Amazon.
* Edited to add: Just to be clear, I don't believe that post (believing posts by self-admitted trolls is a poor idea, see also this), but a scenario along those lines seems plausible. The same result could also have been achieved by way-too-much-time-on-their-hands people with straightforwardly bigoted motives and no technical exploits.
ETA2: Looks like Amazon's external flagging process is not automated, or so they claim. The story that's floating around now is that Amazon was using customer provided tags to flag "adult" content, but some Amazon.fr employee screwed up in terms of which tags to choose. No idea if that's accurate, though.