No More Amazon Around Here

For about a month I had an advertisement from Amazon up on the blog, a book related one that not many people found interesting.  I've chosen to take it down because of Amazon's decision to excise certain gay and lesbian fiction from some of their best seller lists.  They did so, not on the basis of graphic sexual content or inappropriate salacious details but because of the sexual orientation of the protagonists and themes of the books.  The method used, the ethics of doing so and the online reaction to Amazon's decision are discussed in Why Amazon Didn't Just Have a Glitch:

This weekend it was discovered that Amazon had filtered out some books as "adult" even though those books had minor sexual or erotic themes (fiction) or were non-fiction discussion classes of people associated with particular sexual orientations. Apparently, these filters began to pop up two months ago and while Amazon was notified at the time, many ¿ including me ¿ weren't aware of the problem until Mark Probst, author of ?The Filly,? realized his book was missing it's "sales rank" from Amazon. He questioned them, and they replied:

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.Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage

Amazon won't miss us--I think all told maybe one person clicked on the ad once.  But as our ability to manipulate information becomes more sophisticated we have to watch out for this kind of thing, which is far more targeted and difficult to uncover that rather straightforward forms of discrimination, such as redlining or Jim Crow laws.  And, unlike racial or religious discrimination, "sexual orientation" is not a protected class receiving the highest level of protection against discrimination under the Equal Protection clause and so it's up to us to speak up when our friends and neighbors are discriminated against.

Comments

[Robin]

so wait, i'm not sure i'm following this. just to clarify, they're classifying books as "adult" if they involve gay characters? how is this happening? wtf?