A strange thing happened yesterday on web megastore Amazon.com: all the gay-themed literature was suddenly recategorized as "adults only" and was removed from the all-important Amazon rankings. When the blogosphere and the twitterers noticed, the debated over Amazon's actions erupted online. Twitter went crazy. The hashtag #amazonfail quickly rose through the Twitter ranks as a top topic.
The company claims it was only trying to limit access to adult material, and that gay literature was inadvertently swept up in the category changes. So is Amazon anti-gay? Or just clumsy? It's not completely clear what happened, rumors of hacks and customer hate-based tagging abound, but the company is not helping clear the air over exactly what happened although they did apologize for being "ham-fisted".
Baratunde Thurston, better known by some as @baratunde, joins The Takeaway with his thoughts on what happened on Amazon.com.
via thetakeaway.org
I still can't believe I got to the studio at 7:10 in the morning. That's just ridiculous. You can click through to stream the audio (http://bit.ly/164wtF). My basic point is that in order to maintain the community trust Amazon depends on, it must fully disclose what happened, offer a sincere apology and fix it.
Also, Amazon is totally gay.