Oh, please.

[textualdeviance]

With all due respect to the folks on my flist who freaked out about this:

The idea that the Amazon thing this weekend was some sort of deliberate company policy thing is preposterous.

First, Amazon is and always has been a queer-friendly company, and by its very nature, not exactly the kind of place to bow to right-wing pressure about anything. This is not Wal-Mart, folks. Nor is it SixApart.

Second, anyone who has worked on the back end of any sort of major online presence, whether that's retailing, news or just about anything else, knows very well how massive databases work, and how one person pushing the wrong button can completely screw up an entire chunk of data.

Which is, as I guessed when this first came out, likely exactly what happened.

Is there a real company policy to filter porn from ranking and thus generic searches? Sure. My guess is that that filter's been in place for a long time. Had there been an intention in the first place to filter out the material in question, it would've happened back then, and not suddenly happened well after the filter was established.

Granted that I'm biased, but sometimes, my fellow progressives really irritate the crap out of me when they're so quick to assume ill intent when any large company appears to do something stupid. All corporations are not the same. Just because Amazon or Costco or dozens of other companies have a large market share doesn't mean they're automatically members of the Axis of Evil (and really, one wonders how Apple always somehow manages to escape this assumption. Justin Long, maybe?)

Size does limit companies' ability to be agile when something does go wrong, but it's ridiculous to assume that EVERY large company is necessarily headed by some sort of demonic issuance from the hellmouth, or that every boneheaded action taken by any employee necessarily reflects on everyone else, from the board on down to the poor schlub who cleans the cafeteria. (And conversely? It's not exactly sane to assume that a given smaller corp or even the corner mom-and-pop is necessarily good, either. You might be surprised to know how many small companies exploit workers and discriminate.)

I'm 100% in favor of boycotts, conscience shopping, letter-writing campaigns and every other consumer-oriented way of exerting pressure on companies for many different kinds of misdeeds. But if you're going to do that, at least have the common sense to research the company's entire history first, and not go on rumor and stupid online memes to make your buying decisions for you.

Comments

[penguin-attie.livejournal.com]

Loath as I am to quote pnh after the whole RaceFail debacle, he does have a point:

None of which means that anyone shouldn’t be mad at Amazon, or that Amazon shouldn’t be embarrassed. Rather, it means that this is how the world works. A great deal of racism, homophobia, etc., happens not because anyone particularly wants to be racist or homophobic, but because the ground has been tilted that way by arrangements made long ago and if you’re not constantly on the lookout it’s easiest to roll downhill.

The issue here is still that someone thought it was a good idea to remove certain books from searches. Which is not how customers would assume they work. Therefore, I feel cheated.

However, it is ironic that an employee at Amazon France is being blamed for thinking "gay" was obviously an adult category. France. Where the outside of every newsstand is plastered with boobs and the occasional man-on-man action. In plain view of the children!

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

However, it is ironic that an employee at Amazon France is being blamed for thinking "gay" was obviously an adult category.

Except that that's not what happened.

What happened was that the category for "adult" (porn) got conflated with categories for "erotica" and "sexuality." Hence why the stuff on sex for people with disabilities got thrown into the mix.

What was likely the culprit? A language barrier. Not homophobia.