rogin: (Default)
2009-06-09 01:51 pm
Entry tags:

amazon again this time with the NDP

After the whole amazon.fail affair around easter, there's another incident that makes amazon look rather questionable. I just read an article about amazon having a cooperation with the german neonazi party NDP. They are one of amazons many "partners" that feature amazon links on their websites and get provisions for sold books.

The cooperation was recently ended, obviously under quite some public pressure, since amazon's own terms don't allow racism on their partner webpages. But the fact that they started such cooperation in the first place is rather disconcerting in my opinion.
Of course their main interest is to reach as many customers as possible, but they should pay some consideration as to what kind of people they're going to bed with.

Do they have this kind of cooperation with other fascist parties as well?

Here are two article on the subject, sadly both in german.

http://www.welt.de/webwelt/article3861704/Politiker-schwingen-Boykott-Keule-gegen-Amazon.html#vote_3866023

http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=1244460245044
rogin: (Season 8)
2009-04-14 12:33 pm
Entry tags:

Amazon fail update

Looks like this is really turning into a pretty deep mess for amazon.
I was just checking the site and then to see if some books I care about have gotten their ranks back (happy to report a lot of them have), then I tried "homosexuality" as a searchword again to see if it still turned up only those crap books about healing gay people. Turns out the "Parent's guide to prevent homosexuality" is still on top, BUT is now equipped with pictures of the KKK and a swastica.

If amazon was really responsible for the censorship in the first place they certainly deserve the PR nightmare they're having right now, but if this came from abuse of the rating system it's going to turn the place upside down in the worst way.

I kind of liked the customer rating system and with all it's flaws (like reviews of genre haters on genre books) I still found it very informative and found features like fotos of the products very handy most of the time. Now the site is probably going to be trolled from all sides.