Amazon's 'Adult' Title Issue
The Amazon incident resulted in books ranging from Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain to James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room being labeled as "adult" titles and thereby having their sales ranks removed. indicate how well a product is selling on the site. A stronger score can lead to better placement within in-site searches and best-seller lists.
The issue was , who discovered that his own work -- a gay romance novel called The Filly -- was among the items affected. A Twitter campaign soon followed under the heading "," and and even arrived shortly thereafter.
A Hacker's Story
"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.