Amazon claims glitch affected search & ranking; consumers say #glitchmyass

I had intended to dissect the Quirk letter to bloggers this week, but this amazon thing came up and I thought an update was in order for those of you who don’t have the time or inclination to follow developments in real time.

When last we left the online bookseller, 58 000 books related to GLBT, erotica, feminism, and sexuality had their sales ranks removed which in turn removed them from amazon bestseller lists and front page searches. This stirred up a “Twittershitstorm” as it is known in web parlance which was tagged #amazonfail (click on the link to see the latest in the conversation).

Being a long weekend, there was no official company response until Monday and even then it was minimal with several online news outlets reporting that amazon had told them it was a “glitch.” Some people who had contacted amazon by email received an apology email with a similar message. (Much to my amusement, this poor PR response immediately sparked the tag #glitchmyass on Twitter). Amazon has a habit of blaming everything on glitches and then when the fuller explanation comes much later it usually turns out that their definition of “glitch” is loose, to say the least.

In my earlier post, I linked to a blog that hypothesized this was some kind of hacker attack. This was the likeliest explanation I had seen by that point (far more likely than “glitch”) because there is an undeniably human element to the books that were delisted. A computer glitch is, by my definition, a programming issue or hardware failure. If this was a glitch then the delisted books should not have fallen along political/religious lines in topics that are not specifically political or religious. That’s a complicated way of saying that a computer glitch would have hit books on homosexuality equally, thereby clearing the category in searches rather than selectively delisting all but anti-gay books which seems to be what happened (e.g. on Sunday the search result for homosexuality on amazon’s site returned a book on curing homosexuality as the top result).

Predictably enough, soon a hacker claiming responsibility for the delisting of books on amazon appeared. Also predictable? The prompt appearance of the twitter tag #hackermyass. A few people have poked through the code that the hacker posted and called bullshit. I’m not geek enough to know either way. What I do know is that the motivation the supposed hacker claims for the attack doesn’t match up with the books that were delisted. I’m not suggesting that everyone is logical or rational, but there is a disconnect between “gay people kept flaggging my I-wanna-chick-to-do-heroin-with ads on Craigslist” and the list of books that were delisted.

In response to a hacker claiming responsibility for the delisting of books, anonymous coders at amazon have come out and said the problem is internal though a human-mediated internal problem as opposed to the glitch claimed by amazon. It seems that amazon is claiming that an amazon.fr employee “mistakenly” labelled 58 000 books as adult and it propagated around the global amazon system. Predictably, this spawned (can you guess? Oh, come on, sure you can …) the twitter tag #francemyass.

Now, I’m willing to buy the internal employee explanation considering what happens every time a negative review of Dianetics is submitted and how product reviews submitted by authors “brazen” enough to mention that they’ve also written a book are treated. What I don’t buy is that this was an accidental tick of the wrong box on a form. These books don’t appear to have anything in common other than they all offend a particular ideology.

I find it incredibly unlikely that an employee would be legitimately working on this particular collection of books in the course of their work duties. Also, I don’t buy that this is a language problem. I speak, write, and read French. The word for “adult” in French is the very distantly related *cough* “adulte.” Yeah, I can see how that might be confusing.

Of course, there’s no explanation as to why a French employee would be asked to classify English books at all (other than part of the stereotype of Americans is that they hate the French so it may not be far off the mark to suggest that amazon is trying to deflect blame to the French although that sounds absolutely ridiculous — then again it’s part of the French stereotype that they hate Americans so … maybe). The list of books delisted suggests a far better knowledge of English books and American religious/sexual politics than one would expect from someone outside the country. I think there is still a missing piece to this puzzle. [Note: There reports as to whether this was a French employee of amazon.fr or an American employe editing amazon.fr are unclear.]

So, will the truth please stand up? Obviously amazon.com is going to make us work for this rather than just going with the truth. So what do we know at this point?

• amazon.com has a method for flagging adult content to remove it from front page searches and sales rank. We know this because early responses from customer service at amazon consistently gave this response, months apart, to two authors inquiring about disappearing books (links and text of response in previous post if you missed them). The responses seem to have been identical, suggesting they are canned which in turn suggests that this type of removal is some kind of “feature” rather than a “bug.”
• Books that were delisted spanned a large number of categories, which Amazon disingenuously used to suggest that this was not targeted at sexuality in general and GLBT in particular. However, this ignores that the books in health, memoir, parenting, etc. fell within common themes rather than random ones.
• Related to the above point, there is a logic to the books that were delisted and the ones that weren’t within the same categories but that logic is a distinctly human ideological one rather than an impartial machine one that you would expect with a computer “glitch.”
• Amazon will not give customers a (pardon the pun) straight answer. They aren’t known for giving such answers and don’t appear to be starting now. Given the possible scenarios that have been presented (glitch, hacker, internal meddling) it’s likely that their PR believes that more damage will be sustained by giving a satisfactory answer.

And that’s more than you’ll ever want to know about my thoughts on this little PR tempest. I’ll leave you with this little bit of humour from the excellent “The Other Coast” which was particularly appropriate yesterday:

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