- filed under Feminism, Media, Share This!, Tech
I wrote a quick article about what the deal with Amazon is:
Over the holiday weekend, a firestorm let loose on the Internet: For no apparent reason, books on Amazon.com with feminist, LGBT and sexual-empowerment themes were removed from the sales rankings, numbers that show how well a product is performing on the website.
Angry authors and readers responded by launching a full-on social media assault, using blogs, Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness and to collect signatures on a petition.
Rapid response campaigns not affiliated with any one organization are increasingly becoming the norm in the age of free communication tools. The Amazon incident (dubbed "AmazonFAIL," drawing on usage of "fail" as an indicator of strong disapproval in online cultures) is a fascinating example in part because of the cultural motivation behind and the mechanics of the removal and the implications for sales of "banned" books.
posted Mon., Apr 13, 2009 at 12:50pm
tags: amazon • amazonfail • announcement • campaign • social media • twitter
April 13th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
What amazed me is that the "glitch" was a large scale cross site scripting attack. I talk about XSS at work all the time. The execution here was pretty brilliant. And the results were that one marginalized but vocal community rose up against a large corporation on the notion of being biased against – chose ensues, playing right into the meta-troller's hand.
It bothers me that given the scale of it, more people aren't actually talking about the nature of the "glitch" that caused it.