A couple of random thoughts….
Firstly, I felt rather moved today at seeing several dozen other students observing the Day of Silence today. Apparently some people actually care, even amongst the hyper-conservative environment we have here here.
Second, I really hope someone gets to the bottom of this whole ‘amazonfail’ debacle. I find it very hard to believe that they would ever intentionally derank LGBT books. (Especially when they didn’t derank many other, extremely vulgar books, both gay and straight) This has all the markings of an attack. It happened over easter weekend, for goodness sake! They’re calling it a glitch – but they won’t really know what happened until they go through all the logs, which could take weeks. For that matter, the logs may not even exist at this point, and if it was some ‘report as offensive’ feature that is responsible, it may be impossible to ever really know. Amazon is an enormous website, after all. It might even be nothing but a typo in a script somewhere, unbalancing an automated flagging spider.
And yet, there’s this. Which, if accurate, means that they’ve been ignoring the problem for a while. And that amazon is understaffed with lazy bums. Which is expected, but disgusting. I don’t think it’s worth boycotting them at the moment, but I’d really like to know more.