Amazon.com Controversy

While Easter is a day that is usually reserved for familial bonding and gorging on chocolate, the most recent incarnation of the holiday played witness to a scandal of its own: on April 12, news sources across the country reported that Amazon.com had somehow de-ranked thousands of gay and lesbian-themed texts, causing the ever-vocal Internet audience to explode in protest.

From books and music to electronics and home appliances, every product sold on Amazon.com has a sales rank that is used to determine its commercial success on the site in question. When the rank is removed, however, a product becomes virtually impossible to find within the database, even when explicitly detailed in the search engine. For an author trying to promote his or her product to the general public, then, de-ranking is the figurative “kiss of death.”

As soon as the problem was made public knowledge, rumors that the site had been hacked ran rampant, and many in the online community questioned Amazon’s ability to guarantee its users safe online transactions. In an effort to assuage any suspicions regarding the company’s intentions or credibility, Patty Smith, Amazon’s director of corporate communications, issued a statement that blamed the problem on a “glitch” in the system and assured the public that the matter would be handled immediately.

Most protestors were not appeased by the explanation that failed to address how the glitch had occurred in the first place in addition to how long these titles had been suppressed from popular viewership.

Complaints that the company had been removing the sales ranks of LGBT literature began as early as February, when popular memoirist Craig Seymour realized that his own work had practically vanished from the Web site. It was not until mid-April when fellow author Mark Probst finally sent a query to the company, however, that the matter truly rose to the surface of the public consciousness.

Probst’s novel The Filly, a poignant romance that details the relationship between two men, lost its ranking completely without warning, but when he investigated the matter further, the author received an official response from Amazon.com that said only the following:

“In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best-seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.”

It is the definition of the term “adult,” however, that has proved to be so widely controversial and alienating. Books containing positive depictions of homosexuality were de-ranked across the board; Leslea Newman’s book Heather Has Two Mommies, for instance, which was written for children between the ages of four and eight, was nowhere to be found, while books depicting explicit violence, photographic nudity and heterosexual sex retained their original rankings in the database. Allegations that Amazon was advancing a homophobic agenda spread rapidly throughout the blogosphere, and the tag #Amazonfail was temporarily the most popular subject of conversation on Twitter. 

Other prominent titles that disappeared from the database include Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, which inspired the Academy Award-nominated film of the same title, as well as comedian Ellen DeGeneres’s autobiography. Even now, a simple search for the latter immediately turns up such products as the sexually-explicit D. H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the homophobic Joseph Nicolosi title A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Even to the woefully uninformed, the relationship between those three titles appears entirely incongruous.

In recent weeks, Amazon has taken several steps to ensure that such a problem does not occur again. Whether the initial action occurred due to the aforementioned glitch, the work of a hacker or the decision of an unnamed executive, the fact that numerous Facebook groups and pop culture bloggers are monitoring Amazon’s progress should ensure that company censorship on such a large scale will not happen again any time soon.