Amazon Glitch Causes Controversy
Amazon has been criticized for its "de-ranking" policy. The company was under attack after de-ranking adult titles which were mostly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender books. The company had recently implemented a new policy of removing adult-material from search rankings, which would result in their exclusion from best-sellers lists. Amazon came under fire on Twitter after it was reported that the sales rankings of two newly released high-profile gay romance novels had suddenly disappeared from the sales rankings. The twitter community responded immediately and angerly, as tweets flew around and a top-ranked hash-tag ( a hot topic) appeared: #amazonfail. To make matters worse, the next day hundreds of gay-friendly books disappeared from the sales rankings and best-sellers lists! The GLBT community doubted it was a website-glitch and were outraged. Publisher Mark R. Probst, a member of Amazon Advantage sent an email to Amazon about the incident to clarify to followers ...