Banned Books: Analysis of Censorship on Amazon.com (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Banned Books: Analysis of Censorship on Amazon.com (2024)

citizenlab.ca

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The methodology is pretty limiting; it excludes books that Amazon has banned in all countries (e.g. [1]).

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/03/12/amazon-...

That was definitely censorship through government pressure, but as governments change, the pressure goes away.

https://www.amazon.com/When-Harry-Became-Sally-Transgender/d...

Wikipedia:

> In February 2021 the book was the first removed from Amazon.com's store under a new hate speech policy enacted by the company. The move was criticized by the National Coalition Against Censorship, and United States Senator Tom Cotton. On March 12, in response to a letter from four other senators, Amazon clarified that the company has "chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness". Anderson denies that his book describes transgender persons as "mentally ill". On February 2025, Amazon reversed their decision, now allowing the book on their store.

> In misleading its customers and censoring books, Amazon is violating its public commitments to both LGBTIQ and more broadly human rights.

Anyone who believes in such "commitments" in the first place is a fool.

As a reminder, Amazon is a business, and its first priority is to make money. Everything else does not really matter.

The next iteration of The Anarchist Cookbook going to include a trans protagonist so it becomes unbannable

Just because someone frequently lies doesn't mean they're exempt from ever being criticized about it again.

Yes but dont pretend you thought they were having any moral qualms, their only goal is to maximize profit, even if that kills any future profits.

We deserve a better system. It's inhumane.

I think you're the fool in that comment, for letting Amazon give you this excuse.

Everyone and every organization has responsibilities to the community. They are parasites if they leave the community, on which they depend 100%, to others. Business depends 100% on a system of laws, freedom, peace, social goods (e.g., education for their workers and customers - who is going to read? - healthcare for them), infrastructure, security, order, prosperity, ......... Try operating a business without those things.

One could argue, successfully I think, that Amazon's business is 99% utilizing community resources and they add only a small bit of their own.

I don't know which utopia you are living in. I'd like to be there as well.

Cynicism-fried take imo. The discussion over what responsibilities private cooperative endeavors have towards the broader public is a couple dozen centuries old at least, and is in no sense finished. This arrangement has changed countless times before and is still changing now before our eyes. If you can no longer imagine how it could be different then yes, certainly sit down and give up, you have nothing to offer here. But so then why would you offer this? Is it your dream that others surrender as you have?

You're entitled to feel whatever you want about how Amazon behaves. It will not affect how Amazon behaves, even if presented in a very inspirational way. Inventing a 2400 year history of discussion of "private cooperative endeavors" that change "countless times," however, is not inspirational. Be specific about what has happened, when it happened, and how it has changed things. Point out when random people's feelings about "the arrangement" have mattered, and when the "cynical" opinion about that was wrong.

Or better, face the fact that Amazon responds to power, not to you. People who post just to call other people's opinions cynical, without adding anything of substance, could be replaced with AI with no loss. You don't know anything about people's dreams.

> will not affect how Amazon behaves, even if presented in a very inspirational way.

It does and will. Amazon has to respect laws and not alienate customers, and also has goodwill toward their community - even if it's trendy to talk like sociopaths.

> Inventing a 2400 year history of discussion of "private cooperative endeavors" that change "countless times," however, is not inspirational.

I don't know about the length of time, but the discussion has gone on for generations.

Your current position is tied to a 1980s theory, new at the time (and maybe from Milton Friedman?), that the only role of corporations is serving its shareholders. Somehow, people have accepted this one theory as an eternal truth. But clearly that doesn't happen; it's a matter of degree: Corporations pay taxes, fund workers compensation, etc.

More recently DEI and ESG have been widely embraced, one side of the argument, and currently the tide in the US is to reject them. The tide will change again.

In other countries, the degree of oblgation to other stakeholders is much greater. German companies are required (?) to have labor representatives on the board of directors, for example. Japanese companies traditionally have a very strong commitment to career employees.

He lives in the utopia protected by the public army and opines via the network invented by public research.

I recently learned that this idea of the responsibility of a business as being to maximize shareholder value is kind of recent, and that in the 50s and 60s, in the US, they actually applied a stakeholder capitalist idea, where the purpose of a business was to maximize not shareholder value, but stakeholder value, which would have been the employees, customers, communities, and society at large.

I think we are all a fool as well to simply accept that the made up institution of "business" has to be about maximizing shareholder value, like anything, this is all a political game, and it is what we agree to make it.

This is leftist propaganda masquerading as objective research, entirely ignoring the significant amount of "hate speech" censorship that goes on, as well.

Whatever your opinion about what books should or shouldn't be banned, claiming the issue is pretty much exclusively one of censorship of LGBTQ material is inane.

Agree, but this has nothing to do with the left / working class. I was also more interested in how Amazon may or may not be censoring or, more likely, deprioritizing, books of certain topics in the West. I already know that China bans ye ol' Tank Man of Tiananmen square. It's the first thing everyone brings up when they want to point out how much more morally superior we are in the West. /s It's so old, it's even boring.

> I already know that China bans ye ol' Tank Man of Tiananmen square. It's the first thing everyone brings up when they want to point out how much more morally superior we are in the West.

The difference is that in China the government is the party doing the censoring, but in the west it's the corporations that have our government in their pockets who are doing the censoring.

"You can solve every problem with another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many levels of indirection".

"banned books" has a number of connotations. In common PR culture it refers to books that school districts have censored, but are otherwise generally available for sale .

In this article they are referring to popular books on Amazon that are censored from theocratic or Islamist countries.

If you want to find the real banned books, look for books that are $300+ on Ebay. Those are books that publishers refuse to publish and retailers refuse to sell. I'm not aware of statute banning those books, but they are in a practical sense banned from publication.

I am confused about what subset of books you are referring to. Many expensive books, in the range you mentioned, are collectible editions of books still in print.

not those ones

There was a big battle over whether Amazon would sell a book about transgender children. For a while, it was banned for a bit but then the company changed its mind.

https://www.intomore.com/culture/amazon-reverses-ban-abigail...

I dont think schools should be censoring books, buying precensored books that have the substance yanked out to prevent offending politicians, nor should they be banning books.

I also get super frustrated at Conde Nast for taking a lot of their old shit out of print, causing it to fetch prices in the hundreds.

Do you have kids ?

Yes

If I made a gift of "The Turner Diaries" to your local school library, would you "censor" it?

Nope

Yes, UAE, China and Yemen ban books... But this article would have been far more interesting if it has shed some light on what books Amazon bans in the US and Europe. It's not like this doesn't happen.

There is an old joke -- "they call it corruption in asian countries, they call it lobbying in western countries"

Similarly here, they call it banned books in middle eastern countries, they call it anti-semitism in western countries.

These studies like to discuss banned books in middle eastern countries because it helps people here feel good about deporting people for writing op-ed articles: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/tufts-student-from-tur...

they can create the image of our civilized world here in the west as compared to the "unfree" world in the middle east

They made their data public so you might get some insight into your question from that.

Unfortunately their data will not tell you which products in general are censored outside the middle east, but if I understood their methodology correctly you could tell how many of the products censored in the middle east are also censored elsewhere.

"We make our data available here."

Thank you very much! The whole repo is about 500 MiB and has data beyond the Amazon analysis.

They are complying so they can do business in the respective countries. Not really news.

Why do you think the authors are aiming to produce "news"?

Fair point, though we did view it from a site called "Hacker News" so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect these are "news" stories. I think you're both right

Are most submissions here news stories?

Probably depends on how you define “news”, but even though it only has to be 51% I’d say that’s probably not true.

They don’t need to use inaccurate keyword matching (“rainbow mentos”) or opaque messaging in order to comply. The problem existing doesn’t mean the solution is good.

How else would you comply with a policy that uses inaccurate keyword matching to ban media?

It's not like middle eastern countries only have a list of books that are banned. They have that for sure, but they also have a blanket ban on LGBT stuff as well as other "obscenities", "things that don't fit in their culture", "political books", "dangerous ideologies", etc. Most of that is left up to the discretion of the customs inspector your package happens to land on. I don't know if Amazon has some formal agreement with those countries (and it won't surprise me if they do). But It also might be the headache of dealing with items confiscated at customs. I agree on the opaque messaging. But I suspect it's less headache to say "Sorry item out of stock" than to say "This item doesn't ship to Saudi Arabia" then have to go on a fight with the customer who is gonna argue "no it's not banned"

There’s an unknowable here. Maybe a customs officer in an ME country crafted a poor regex while processing a data dump of billions of Amazon product listings. But my bet is that it was an Amazon employee, and the customs officer doesn’t know what regex is, and would hopefully recognize that mentos are benign.

Not really sure what makes you even think something like that could happen. A regex is far too specific for such things. Morality laws in the Middle East are extremely vague and flexible to apply on whatever. The rules communicated to Amazon are probably in the form of “nothing that’s morally obscene”, “nothing that’s against god’s nature”, “nothing against our culture”.

We were traveling to Saudi Arabia in the 90s with another family. They confiscated their son’s Pokémon cards because Pokémon was satanic. In the 2000s I was traveling to Egypt and the customs officer demanded explain what a book I had was about. The book cover had a sheriff badge on it, and the office insisted that’s a book about Israel. I learned then that you’ll never see a 6-point star in any form in any Arab country because they view it as an Israel/Zionist thing regardless of the context. Last time I was in Saudi Arabia was in 2016 and they held me at the airport because I had a board game called Mysterium that looked kinda spooky. I travelled there many other times without any incidents. It’s 100% luck of the draw on the customs officer you get.

Things like that going to a customs officer who has to open a random package and inspect it have a chance of being randomly confiscated. Certainly anything that even hints or winks at LGBT stuff is highly illegal there which is what this article is about.

I think you are agreeing with me?

They could at least inform customers about the censorship and not sweep it under the rug:

> among all of the restricted products identified by this study, none presented a message to the user explaining that the items were unavailable due to regulatory reasons. Instead, each item was communicated as either being “currently unavailable”, “temporarily out of stock”, or that “this item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location”.

What's unclear about "this item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location"?

It doesn't tell whether it's due to censorship or some other reason.

Unfortunately, the government sometimes bans disclosing this. The US government, for instance, bans the telcos from telling the customers that they're being tapped.

I get the same message for products that just don't have am affordable delivery route. It's not the right message for this IMO

If a book distributor is going to be criticised for censorship, we should criticise it for voluntary censorship (where it can legally sell a book but makes a voluntary policy decision not to do so), rather than legally mandated censorship under the laws of whatever country. The principle is you have greater responsibility for decisions you make in full freedom than decisions you make under legal coercion. This analysis misses the mark because all the cases it cites are effectively legally mandated censorship, and it ignores all the cases of voluntary censorship

By far the most interesting banned books are those about ideas. These never appear on banned books lists because they have been censored so successfully (usually > a hundred years ago) that journalists and researchers don't know about them and no english translations exist (indeed it is often those translations which are the banned versions). Most of them are in Russian or German, some Romanian or Hungarian.

curious, do you have a example or two of these? would love to read more about them

Here's an example: Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists)

This author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_Ulfkotte ?

With books available via amazon and reviewed on Good Reads? Material can be unpopular and not sell well for many reasons other than state conspiracy to suppress.

It must be that ideas are powerful, maybe the most powerful things. Ideas can move nations, start wars, create revolutions. They can create widespread hate and widespread compassion.

It's as if we, the public, aren't as helpless as we thought, but that mass manipulation via social media - manipulation of ideas - could be exceptionally powerful.

I’ve tried to order Oriana Fallacis The Rage and the Pride 2 years ago on Amazon (Germany). No chance to get it … felt to me like censorship back then.

Oh no, Amazon does comply with regulatory laws of specific countries in order to make business there? How utterly shocking...

Useless report, almost funny. It does not include what Amazon has already banned.

I distinctly remember not being able to buy The Dictator's Handbook[1] from the US Amazon, whilst living in the UAE ~10 years ago.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1610391845/

Breaking news: the Middle East doesn't care about your sexual identity.

on the contrary, it sounds like the people in charge care enough about it to forbid the sale of books about it

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