Today has just been the funniest day I’ve seen on twitter since I signed up with it. In the space of a few hours things went from a quite peaceful Sunday to an “Amazon are gay bashing” day.

It all stems from how a lot of gay, feminist, and other erotic titles were removed from Amazon’s book listing and search engine.

Of course the resident gay community went up in arms accusing Amazon of discrimination and all sorts of crap. Twitter turned into a flame fest with Amazon bashing flying around like mad.

What I find really funny is that rather than waiting for, oh I don’t know, a proper business day, people launched a flame fest on not only a Sunday, but a major religious holiday to boot. I wonder how many people were actually in the Amazon offices today.

From the outset they (the rampant gay fanboy community) were screaming it’s a new policy that Amazon has introduced. But for one I find that a bit hard to believe. Firstly the reporting of objectionable content leading to it’s removal has been on Amazon for ages.

For example there was a time when Scientology were both the victim and perpetrator. Several anti-scientology groups lead a massive campaign on Amazon leading to almost all of their books being delisted for a week. And then of course Scientology responded by flagging and removing any and all negative reviews on their books through the same system.

So, of course something like this has no precedent. It’s completely unheard of in the history of the net. Oh wait, wasn’t Live Journal hit by a similar incident, twice. Firstly over an avatar of a nursing mother, and then over a blanket account wiping. hmmmm guess there was a precedent for it happening.

Sure Amazon are hardly saints, they left an imperfect system in place despite it being abused repeatedly. It wasn’t just Scientology, Christian and Muslim books have also been the victim of it, as have books on creationism and evolution.

So yea in a respect they are partially to blame, but only so far as relying on a system with proven flaws.

Given the way things have worked before, books that are delisted are titles that have been reported a certain number of times. They’re delisted by the software and marked for review. Later a flesh and blood guy (or gal) reviews and either confirms the delisting, or relists the book.

Several authors apparently contacted Amazon and got the following reply:

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.

Given that all of those that I’ve seen seem to have had the exact same response kinda tells me this is a automated response. I’m betting some low ranking employee roped into working the holiday see’s a query as to why a book was delisted for being adult, and sent out the generic company reply above.

Later when something became apparent, they’d of called for help, which resulted in Amazon admitting to a ‘glitch’. But lets face it, no company will come right out and say, look we knew about the possibility but didn’t do anything about it yet. They wrap it up in hyperbole and say ‘glitch’.

I’m not saying that Amazon are saint’s, cause I don’t think anyone believes that. However in this situation I’m more inclined to believe that this was a concentrated and timed troll attack (like has happened in the past), than a new policy of gay bashing by Amazon.

Lets face it, the homosexual scene have enough real life enemies without fabricating a new one in their heads.

Edit: Just found out that it wasn’t just gay/lesbian or feminist titles that were hit. though they seem to have taken the brunt of it. Several other lines were hit as well. Including some of the Black Lace line up,  and some classical literature like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Lolita. Which were delisted and then relisted a few hours later.