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Twitter had a big tizzy yesterday over Amazon.com's supposed censorship of gay and lesbian titles, did you hear? Just one problem: A well-known hacker has come forward and claimed the whole thing was his prank.
The hacker, known as Weev, with whom we've had dealings before the "amazonfail" episode, is saying that the whole escapade was the result of his exploitation of a vulnerability in Amazon's product-rating tools.
What to make of people who don't want to believe this was a prank? They're left with the notion of Amazon.com pursuing homophobic censorship, which must be pleasing to people who see evil behind every "Inc." Pick your conspiracy theory: Someone's playing someone.
A recap: On Friday, two gay-themed romance novels disappeared from Amazon's sales rankings — they were still listed on the site, but could not appear on best-seller lists. On Saturday, hundreds more vanished. Writer Mark Probst asked Amazon.com customer service what happened, and got this answer from an "Ashlyn D." in customer service:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Twitter users started decrying the move en masse, tagging their posts "#amazonfail" and accusing the online retailer of homophobia. Amazon.com PR didn't help matters by calling the problem a "glitch." Even though the sales ranks of most gay and lesbian titles had been restored, Twitterers taunted Amazon.com by posting messages with the tag "#glitchmyass."
Glitch my ass, indeed. One LiveJournal user speculated that the mass flagging of gay books on Amazon.com might be the work of organized antigay groups — or troublemaking hackers:
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