AmazonFail: The Morning After

[rm]

The morning brings us:

Amazon's assertion that it was all just a glitch.

My response? Computers do what you tell them to. This is a glitch that involved human error, homophobic human error. Amazon needs to issue a clear statement that what happened was against policy, is being corrected, is being investigated and that they enjoy serving a broad spectrum of customers, including those interested in gay and lesbian topics. Others agree.

Assertions that the whole thing might be a result of trolling, not dissimilar to the initial set of events that lead to StrikeThrough.

Could be. This does nothing to change that Amazon handed it badly and needs to issue some apologies/statements as noted above.

I also take issue with the assertion that trolling is some sort of public service meant to demonstrate flaws in assumed trust relationships. It's one more form of Internet bullying and harassment.

A fabulous piece in AfterEllen that deserved to be read about the representation of queer characters in media. It speaks to something I make a lot of noise about at panels on fanfiction and it's nice to be hearing it from other quarters.

Annoyance that people got up in arms about this because obviously it wasn't going to turn out to be as nefarious as it seemed.

Public outrage is the Stick of Efficiency. Accidental bias is still bias and still creates a problem. This matter getting public attention in a manner that was largely civilized was useful. If it hadn't gone down this way, authors affects would still be trying to sort this out with Amazon a month from now, as demonstrated by several cases of books that were affected by this nonsense as early as February.

Frustration that the petition didn't adequately address the range of stuff affected, including bisexual and trans content. I agree. It's also the petition everyone is signing. What to do? Competing petitions = bad plan.

Comments

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

This is a really excellent round-up, and your final point was something that stuck in my craw a bit, but I overlooked because a decisive, powerful message is going to move more mountains than many little tiny messages.