p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- It was all a big, BIG mistake, Amazon says.

Censoring adult books, that is.

“Basically, #amazonfail is the name for a brewing Internet shitstorm that started some time on Easter Sunday regarding Amazon.com’s sudden decision to blacklist any books with LGBT(QQI) content from appearing in best-seller lists or search results,” says tehdely on LiveJOURNAL, going on »»»

The blacklist also apparently extends to books with feminist themes, books about dealing with rape, etc. Initial complaints to Amazon resulted in the following stock response, which just angered people more:

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.

“GAY CONTENT IS ADULT??!! RAPE SURVIVOR CONTENT IS ADULT?!!?? HOW DARE YOU AMAZON RARARGH INTERNET RAGE!” responded the masses, freely pointing out the continuing availability of straight porn and sex toys in Amazon search results (or dog-fighting books or trashy romance novels or Mein Kampf or anything else that would be found “objectionable” by any reasonable standards). Clearly a double standard was at play.

Then, “Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday,” says Weev in brutal_honesty .

He’d also noticed “report as inappropriate” feature. But he decided to do something about it.

So, “I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books,” he says, continuing »»»

I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.

So I script some quick bash.
#!/bin/bash
let count = 1
while true; do
links -dump ‘http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=0/?ie=ASCII&rs=1000&keywords=Gay_and_Lesbian&rh=n%3A!1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHomosexuality&page=’`echo $count`|grep \/dp\/ >> /tmp/amazon
((count++))
done

There’s some quick code to grab all the Gay and Lesbian metadata-tagged books on amazon. Then I pull out all the IDs of the given books from those URLs:

cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//

and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.

Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called “Cross-site request forgery’. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. If you ever need a service like that, you can find them in a post like this advertising in the comments:
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/solving-captchas-for-cash/

Then they would log into the accounts, save the cookies in a cookie file and send it to me.

Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books:

for i in `cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//`; do lynx -cookie_file=/home/avex/cookie1 http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/`echo $i`/;done

The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay
and outrage across the blogosphere
ain’t so bad.

The only person to figure it out was dely from Six Apart: http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html
but he has been ground zero at my work, cleaning up my messes before. Who else trolls via moral outrage? Not many in the scene that I know of.

“Why don’t they just burn the books?” – wondered Gore Vidal in The Guardian.

“They’d be better off and it’s very visual on television.”

In the story, Amazon (the company, that is) director of corporate communications Patty Smith states:

“This is an embarrassing and hamfisted cataloguing error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. It has been misreported that the issue was limited to gay and lesbian themed titles.

“In fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as health, mind and body, reproductive and sexual medicine, and erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

“Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.”

Stay tuned.

LiveJOURNAL – On Amazon Failure, Meta-Trolls, and Bantown, April 12, 2009
brutal_honesty -  So I script some quick bash, April, 2009
The Guardian -  Amazon apologises for ‘ham-fisted’ error that made gay books ‘disappear’, April 14, 2009