Being on Twitter, I was reading about #AmazonFail within a few minutes of the first tweets. I began checking for books I’d purchased in the past, and sure enough some titles were missing from the search. But as the online lists of affected titles grew, many of the books didn’t make sense. They included classic literature, autobiographies and a children’s book.
We looked to Amazon for an explanation, and they called it a “glitch. We rightly called bullshit. Glitches happen all at once, and glitches don’t come with scripted emails. This “glitch” had a tail, and it came with a scripted e-mail.
Under pressure, Amazon gave the next bold lie: “some French guy did it.” Except, that didn’t wash either, because there were a lot of products marked with “adult” and “sexuality” tags that didn’t get their rankings stripped. This one-tag-fits-all method should have wiped out everything bearing those tags all at once.
And here we come to the true reason this happened. Not because Amazon hates homos, but because they chose to tamper with sales rankings in a haphazard and stupid way. This method of stripping sales ranks to hide the content did more harm than good, and even after Amazon was aware of the fuck up, they said nothing to their affected customers.
I know, you’re saying, “But Zoe, if you folks knew it was some kind of error all along, why was there so much anger over it?” Because Amazon didn’t say anything to us to explain it.
Please, bear with me for a preachy paragraph. Lots of GLBT people have lost their jobs just for being themselves. Many have lost their homes and have had to work two or three times as hard as straight people to get anywhere in life. We have to work harder, because there is always someone willing to knock us back down, just because. We can be turned out of our churches and told we are unfit for God’s love by the “true believers” of our congregations. On any given day, we’re at a higher risk of being singled out for violence and discrimination in the real world. Randomly, we can expect straight people to walk up to us and shout things like, “You make me sick!”
Just because.
On the Internet, we’ve been offered a measure of equality that we could not find in the real world. We have been able to create long distance support communities, and vendors like Amazon have opened up venues specific to our respective subgroups of the GLBT. We’ve been made to feel like we belong online. However, we often put up with problems in the real world, and that makes us edgy about threats to our “peeps.”
So imagine how we react when a few thousand of our writers are shut out of the ranking system without any explanation. Imagine how we feel when we start talking about it online, and we are dismissed with statements like, “It was just some smut being hidden.”
With every dismissal of our concerns, the issue was escalating. All Amazon had to do to defuse the situation was to say, “Sorry, we were trying out some new content filters and they backfired.” They didn’t. They let us hang, and that, folks, is a severe fuck up of the grade-A variety. You do not leave an angry customer on hold for two days. If you get back to the angry customer after two days, what should be the first words out of your mouth? How about something like, “Sorry to keep you waiting for so long…”
But Amazon said nothing, and worse, they acted like it was okay to leave us hanging. This is a PR nightmare for Amazon now, becauce they tried to lie twice. Then they admitted that this is something they’ve been planning for a while, and it didn’t work the way they thought it would. It took out a lot more content than they intended.
Do I think they discriminated against us on purpose? No. But I think they owed us an explanation, and they needed to do it without trying to pass the buck. Instead, they tried to lie, twice.
That’s why it pissed me off.
... I write dark fiction in a variety of genres. My blog contains my rants and rambles, and some short fiction that can only be found here.
I can be pretty fucking offensive, so viewer discretion is advised.
That deserves a standing ovation. Well done, Zoe!
Are you aware we live in a world controlled by corporations? They employ slaves and lobby to restrict education so they make workers to fit their needs. Every corporate store is controlling what is on its shelves as do all the virtual stores. Welcome to the 21 century.