Dorothy Marley's Journal

In response to my question about the adult filters, I received the following reply:

Hello again from Amazon.com.

As promised, I researched your inquiry for a turn off/on option for the filter.

In response to customer feedback, adult-themed products are now filtered out of our All Products Search. The All Products Search appears on our Welcome page, and can be found in the drop-down search menu in each Amazon.com store.

If your keyword search matches any adult-themed products in our catalog, those results will not automatically be shown to you. You will see a link at the bottom of the search results page that reads, "These search results have been filtered to remove adult products. Click here to include these items in your results." By clicking on that link, you will see the additional items that match your query. However, there is no option to “turn off/on” at this time.

It is not possible to turn the All Products Search filter off; however, searches within individual stores do not have this feature. For example, if you search in our Movies & TV store, using the normal search feature, mature-themed titles will not be filtered out.

The problem is that when I went over there and searched "homosexuality," I turned up a paltry four pages of results with no sign of the "search results have been filtered" link. The links under the book titles indicated that there were over 63,000 books under that topic. I didn't get those results until I searched the same term and limited it to the Books department. And the top results still leaned heavily to "Homosexuality is wrong" and "How to prevent it." Maybe they're still in the process of fixing the "glitch," but this does not bode well.

On the other hand, the search results I got when I typed in "gay" were decidedly un-filtered, so who can tell?

The bottom line is that I do not believe the Amazon deliberately tried to un-rank and hide books about gay and lesbian issues. I also think that the front-page-only filtering is a good compromise, especially since un-filtered results are fairly easily accessible. But the fact remains that gay and lesbian books, and books about feminism, seem to be disproportionately vulnerable to these errors in filtering. It's also a fact that Amazon didn't bother to inform any of their customers about the filtering until they were caught at it. I haven't decided yet how comfortable I feel in continuing to shop there, but I'm also going to continue to pester them about this issue.

I'm sure that some of you have already been bombarded with information about Amazon.com's new dickwad policy of removing sales rankings and search results for gay- and lesbian-themed material. If you are among that number, please feel free to move along. :)

For the rest of you, here's what's been happening.

The policy of removing ranks and limiting searches for "adult" materials has, apparently, been implemented on a small--and secret--scale for several months. It was only recently, when several high-ranking gay and lesbian themed novels disappeared from said rankings, that author Mark Probst inquired about why his novel, The Filly, had disappeared. Here is the text of the reply he received:

( Amazon's Reply to Mark Probst )

Now, I have, in fact, read The Filly. It's a young adult novel. There is no explicit sex, no violence. It's about a young man discovering and exploring his first love, and coming to terms with his own sexuality. That's it. And just because the young man happens to be gay, Amazon.com has decided that young men who are, perhaps, trying to find materials to help them deal with their own sexuality shouldn't be allowed to read this book. (In a dose of truly bitter irony, A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality is now at the top of the search for "homosexuality" on Amazon. How nice.)

Yesterday, I wrote to Amazon using the "Contact Us" button on the Help page. Here's the letter I sent:

( My first letter to Amazon )

I wasn't the only one who sent a letter, and today I, and the others who had e-mailed, received this letter in return, claiming that the issue was a "glitch":

( Amazon's automated reply )

Considering that they had just told Mark Probst outright that The Filly's exclusion was a new policy, my immediate response, echoed by most everyone else who'd received this letter, was "Glitch, my ass." I clicked the "No" link, and sent the following:

( My second letter to Amazon )

( Some links )

Some final thoughts:

Why the heck, if Amazon was so keen to "protect" their shoppers, did it not occur to them to give their customers an opt-out for this? I can buy that the wholesale eradication of anything gay and lesbian wasn't what they had in mind--though I'm also pretty sure that they're way more sorry for getting caught than for doing it. But it's clear that they have been--and probably intend to continue--filtering the searches for all their customers whether they want it or not. Even if they implement this policy in an even-handed manner to filter only material that is sexually explicit or violent (though, frankly, violence doesn't seem to be bothering them much), I do not want this. I'd still be pissed about singling out the gay and lesbian books, but I would be a lot less angry if I had the option to choose for myself whether I wanted to be "protected" by Amazon's search filters.

Oh, yeah: Amazon Rank

ETA: If you're looking for an alternative to Amazon, Indie Bound is a site where you can search for books and then order them from an independant bookseller in your area. Very nifty.

ETA 2: ( Amazon's second reply )

Okay. I am willing to grant that Amazon did not deliberately set out to eradicate gay and lesbian-themed works, that the "error" was widespread enough to suggest that it wasn't targeted.

This doesn't, however, answer any of my above concerns about the fact that they've started filtering content in the first place, without the knowledge or permission of their users. I suppose, really, that it's almost a good thing this happened, because otherwise I wouldn't have known that they were filtering. Also, the fact that Amazon admitted to filtering The Filly shows that they have no clue what they're doing with said filtering process. I'm also not convinced that the process isn't somewhat biased against gay and lesbian content, if an Amazon rep could blithely presume that The Filly was adult. I guess I'll be waiting to see Amazon's next move.