So, this whole Amazonfail thing is pretty wacky. For those of you not emersed in the Internet, the short version goes like this: A bunch of LGBT/feminist and sex ed books listed on Amazon were reclasified as “adult” and omitted from the search rankings. This meant that if you did a subject search, you wouldn’t find Heather Has Two Mommies or It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments unless you did a title search. However, if you searched for” Girl Scout cookies” you’d also find recommendations for stripper costumes, wolf urine, and a vaginal speculum. Naturally, some people were a bit concerned. Others went apeshit, calling for Jeff Bezos’ head a stake. On Twitter, #amazonfail became the biggest thread and the one with the most up to date info, proving Twitter’s worth in tracking news in real time. Some said this was a coordinated effort by astroturfing Famly Values Mafia types trying to drag LGBT books down to Bantown. Amazon released some standard boilerplate about a glitch and then later released a statement saying that this was all, “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error.” I’ll say.*
Anyway, this is all still a brewing haha. I reccomend following the news as it unfolds on Making Light, who, as usual, have the most levelheaded comments and thoughtful analysis for all your Internet-related WTF needs.
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* Good to know it’s not just us little liberal arts schools with wacky cataloging errors and that the gods of the Catalog sometime shit on the big boys, too.
