BonnieWebLass.com

A Twit-storm the like of which I haven't noticed since #motrinmoms broke out yesterday. The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog has a fine single-page reference to the #amazonfail fiasco. In some circles the unfortunate event is being portrayed as "Amazon decides to block gay and lesbian books" but that's overstated. In fact, all that happened (which is bad enough) is that non-explicit books about gay and lesbian issues were somehow flagged as adult material, making them harder to find on the site. It's critical to note that other topics, such as rape, were affected as well as SOME straight sexuality-related titles. Amazon told Publishers Weekly it was a glitch, causing #glitchmyass to join #amazonfail as today's hot Twitter tag.

The problem with the immediate assumption of intentionality on Amazon's part is selection bias. The twit-storm focused almost exclusively on the glitch's impact on gay subject matter, because an author in that community brought the issue to light, and the community response, accordingly, focused on gay material. In fact, the glitch affected many topics that all have in common the frank discussion of sexuality, issues tangentially related to sexuality, or (more below) certain individual or subcultural biases that are inconsistent with Amazon's intended policies.

At this point, it's easy to believe the glitch story -- although I would describe it as a taxonomical glitch rather than a technical one. And an interesting discussion not taking place is the overlap of gay-related (and other affected) categories and keywords in family-friendly and adult contexts. The confusion this can cause may be ideologically neutral -- or not. I'm reminded of Olympic hopeful Tyson Homosexual, whose last name (guess what it is) was auto-replaced in news feeds by an "inappropriate language" filter on a conservative website. One can certainly infer an attitude toward gay people by a preference for the term homosexual (as if it were still a medical disorder), along the lines of what happens when you Google "Jew" as opposed to "Judaism."

Update April 14: Interestingly, a language-cultural barrier may have contributed to Amazon's glitch, which they've now attributed to a change to adult flagging made on the French Amazon site.

But something like that could just as easily happen by an effort to filter out any colloquialism. On my first web job, at a software company with worldwide reach, we tried to avoid American slang because so many of our users weren't American or even native English speakers.

What got people thinking about the possible role of tagging in the glitch was the discovery that gay and lesbian authors were also affected, regardless of book content. A list of wrongly-flagged authors and books grew quickly, courtesy of that part of the outraged blogosphere not attending family events yesterday. Along with the books containing G-rated, gay-related subject matter were books in which the only gay aspect seemed to be the sexual orientation of the author -- but Amazon users had tagged them with gay-related keywords anyway. It suggested that someone over at Amazon had adjusted the adult filter to cast a wide net specifically for gay-related keywords and many concluded that Amazon as a company (in their Seattle office, no less) had decided gay=dirty. I'd prefer to confine my ideological quarrels to users who tagged an Ellen Degeneres book with "exhibitionism" and a book about one gay adoption with "gay love," since an adoption memoir by a straight couple would simply be tagged with "adoption."

It's unlikely that tagging would be used for a purpose that had such real financial consequences as loss of sales rank and invisibility in best seller lists -- that's putting too much trust in crowdsourcing.

Did I mention crowdsourcing? Among measures like blog posts, petitions, open letters, etc., a retaliatory tagging campaign was launched. On Amazon, the tag #amazonfail appears on affected books (which, by now, are no longer flagged as adult). And in a variation on Google-bombing that I find guiltily amusing, check out the user-submitted tags for Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. This work of science fiction, adding insult to injury, was one of the few "gay" books that avoided the adult tag. "Hmmmm," mused the Twittersphere and went to work vandalizing the book listing.

Tags for Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality as they appeared on the morning of April 13, 2009. Click picture to enlarge.

The moral of the story: Tags are an easy way to allow users to participate in your site organization. But they aren't "Set It & Forget It!" Now Amazon will need to decide what to do about a) #amazonfail as a tag and b) the tags and off-topic reader reviews now appearing on the Parent's Guide page. For all my ideological sympathy, I can't condone the gesture on user experience grounds, however half-hearted my disapproval must be.