So it appears that maybe Amazon.com is not engaging in censorship. A hacker says he did it, basically by exploiting an Amazon.com “feature” for reporting “inappropriate content.” I’ve always thought those kinds of “features” on websites were dangerous.
“Weev” says he was able to spark the sales rank strippings by exploiting an Amazon.com feature for reporting inappropriate content. A small number of reports on any given title would cause it to lose its ranking, he says—so he created a script to find all gay- and lesbian-themed books, then worked with owners of some (unnamed) popular Web sites to send in scores of complaints.
And if Weev’s claims are true, then he has also made an interesting piece of performance art. In precipitating an outcry by targeting books with gay and lesbian themes to be marked as “inappropriate,” he suggests, despite the wailing of some social conservatives, who will be dragged into reality only kicking and screaming, that there is nothing remotely “inappropriate” with being gay or lesbian.
In other words Weev may have shined a light not just on a vulnerability in Amazon.com’s software, but also on the problem of defining “inappropriate content.” Brilliant.