... amazon.com fiasco ...

[razorjak]

So who actually buys the "It was a rogue programming error." excuse?

For those of you who didn't hear what they tried to pull ... Recently, Amazon.com started to throw anything regarding homosexuality into the porn category and pull their sales ranking.

When they got called out on it, they claimed it was a "glitch".

Yeah, not buying it. Nor anything from them for quite awhile.

Comments

[apestyle.livejournal.com]

Amazon is a Seattle company, hence I have a good friend that works there. The dish is this: over in France a hamfisted programmer took anything that had the "adult" tag and de-listed it. "Adult" in France = porn.
Since their systems are globally linked, the idiot's actions over there affected the systems in the U.S. This shit happened over the weekend, and was corrected on the following Monday. Pretty rapid turnaround if you ask me.
Amazon is pretty well known for supporting its GBLT community, I strongly doubt this was malice, and strongly believe it was one dumbshit's mistake.

[razorjak.livejournal.com]

Dammit! There you go again dashing my cynical views!

Still can't see how "Howard's End" could be considered porn, though.

Some of the stuff that was deranked should never have even had an adult tag in the first place.

[the_axel]

As I understand it the tags are entered both by Amazon and by publishers, and it's entirely possible that the publishers wanted 'Adult' on the titles to differentiate them from 'Childrens' and 'Teens'.

Certainly, in the UK, that was how public libraries classifed things, and book publishers are a traditional lot.

And I very much doubt that the Ledding Library in Milwaukie, OR has 100 000 items of porn.

[apestyle.livejournal.com]

Well apparently it wasn't *only* adult tagged stuff, lots of titles got the virtual axe.