Never Attribute to Bigotry What Can Easily Be Explained by Human Error

When the blog and Twittersphere went nuts over the weekend after discovering that swaths of LGBT themed publications were delisted from Amazon sales rankings and general search (on Easter weekend no less), people were rallying the torches and pitchforks, convinced that Amazon was censoring the offending material and sending a message of veiled bigotry.

It seems that Amazon wasn’t on a campaign to censor and keep LGBT literature away from the general populace, as much as it was a result of human error caused by vocabulary confusion.

According to former employee Mike Daisey, the problem stemmed from a French employee working on the French version of the site confused the vocabulary for adult with erotic and sexuality as a result of local context differences, leading him to enter the information which blacklisted LGBT literature along with other unrelated literature in the Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica categories.

As the Amazon backend is built to synchronize information across international portals, it not only affected titles in the US but it also affected titles across Amazon portals around the world.