How the Amazon ‘Glitch’ Relates to Structural Discrimination and Racism

Technologist Mary Hodder discussed yesterday on the blog TechCrunch the ethical issues related to the Amazon ‘glitch’ that removed the rankings of gay content made me think about analogies between the technical causes of the glitch and how unconscious bias can fuel structural racism.

Background on the Amazon ‘glitch’ issue from Wikipedia (edited):

Users on Twitter generated a firestorm of criticism that some erotic, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, feminist and progressive books were being excluded from Amazon’s sales rankings.

Various books and media were flagged as “adult content” (including children’s books, self-help books, non-fiction, and non-explicit fiction), with the result that works by established authors like E. M. Forster, Gore Vidal, Jeanette Winterson and D. H. Lawrence were now unranked.

The change first received publicity on the blog of author Mark R. Probst, who reproduced an e-mail from Amazon customer service describing a policy of de-ranking “adult” material.

However, Amazon later said that there was no policy of de-ranking LGBT material, and blamed the change first on a “glitch” and then on “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” that had affected 57,310 books.

Here’s the meat of Mary Hodder’s TechCrunch post: Read more