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For those that don’t know what #amazonfail means, it was a hash tagged conversation that went viral on Twitter last Sunday. The outrage was due to Amazon’s de-ranking of books that dealt with LGBT topics so they were hidden from search results. I was guilty of participating in this conversation and was quickly to judge. A lot us took speculation at face value. But I learned my lesson: Twitter may be fast, but some things are best to wait until things clear up.
Here’s Clay Shirky on what really happened:
[...] but we’re no longer willing to cut Amazon any slack, because we don’t trust them, and we don’t trust them because we feel like they did something bad, even though we now know, intellectually, that they didn’t actually do the bad thing we’ve come to hate them for. They didn’t intend to silence gay-themed work, and they didn’t provide the means for groups of anti-gay bigots to do so either. Even if the employee currently blamed for the change in the database turned out to be a virulent homophobe, the problem is in not having checks and balances for making changes to the database, not widespread bias.
