The problem, of course, is that the problem didn’t just impact one kind of book. It impacted fiction, non-fiction, classics. One employee in France (according to the official story) made a huge error. It took weeks to unwind this error. The result, of course, was the authors lost sales *and* sales ranking, even after the glitch was undone. Sadly, the Amazon algorithm worked exactly as it should, and, for example, in the homosexual category, anti-homosexual books (based on false, dangerous premises) ranked in the top ten for far too long.

So dude, as you can see if you’d read anything beyond this, you’d understand that I don’t have a problem with Amazon’s methods to keep adult content behind a wall of sorts. The problem was huge, it had real world impact on sales (and careers), and Amazon never satisfactorily explained what happened (though we were able to infer from their unofficial statements). The fact that one employee in France could wreak so much havoc should be a major concern for any publicly traded company.

Here’s the truth, sunshine:

I worked at Amazon for many years, and I can guarantee you, absolutely and unconditionally, that Amazon did not intend to de-list all GLBT material. The entire company is filled with liberals such as myself, and the checks-and-balances system would make it impossible for a “rogue” manager or executive to do this secretly (plus it would be a guaranteed career ender for that individual.)

I have personally worked on the problem of adult material showing up in inappropriate places (like when searching for “bambi” or “rabbit”), and the problem is more complex than anyone could possibly realize without having inside information about Amazon’s systems. Amazon stocks tens of millions of books, and it would be impossible to manage all of those manually, so they write software to do it. But it’s impossible to write software which flawlessly manages tens of millions of books with human-level comprehension and attention given to each one.

Every time Amazon makes a high-profile mistake, it seems like it launches a hundred conspiracy theories. All these conspiracy theories are wrong, because they all start with the assumption of a deliberate act. I personally have made an innocent mistake which adversely affected a certain class of books (I won’t tell you which), and it sparked accusations of prejudice and censorship from that community. The accusations were of course wrong; it’s just that the particular programming error I made happened to adversely affect their books far more than any others, and non-programmers have trouble understanding how this could be anything other than a deliberate act (especially when Amazon refuses to explain what really happened).

I really, really wish I could tell everyone why adult content has to be singled out and suppressed. It’s not for the reason anyone would think; it’s really more of a technical issue. But I signed an NDA. So it will have to suffice for me to say that, without manual suppression, the adult content would slowly but inexorably take over, sort of like a virus. Eventually it would reach the point where you could do a search for “violin”, and the first ten pages of results would be adult content. Every adult book or video in the world with “violin” in its title or description would appear at the top of the results list (and not because they sell well).

Also, here’s the link to this statement: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10217715-93.html

Next time, try to check things out first before you open up your mouth.

I find that’s not the case from an author I follow, she keeps updating her Amazon blog with the current state of affairs, and what seems to be a clear Amazon boycott to some (if not all) LGBT authors.

More can be read here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK1RVRRIDQHKB0O