WAS it a mistake, or was it a “mistake”?

On Monday, Amazon.com confessed to “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” that caused thousands of books — a large proportion of them gay and lesbian themed — to lose their sales rankings, making them difficult to find in basic searches.

The apology followed an eruption of online criticism, much of it on Twitter, that accused Amazon of homophobia, discrimination and censorship.

Although the way messages speed across social networks makes today’s digital world ripe for mob-fueled conspiracy theories, the controversy over Amazon was striking both for its ferocity and for the velocity with which it spread.

That Amazon, which many fear will soon come to dominate the book business, appeared to be disenfranchising certain authors, made the situation seem even more ominous and the “error” explanation all the more suspicious.

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It wasn’t the first time that a technological failure or an addled algorithm has spurred accusations of political or social bias. Nor is it likely to be the last. Cataloging by its very nature is an act involving human judgment, and as such has been a source of controversy at least since the Dewey Decimal System of the 19th century. Today, the Internet is built on complex algorithms that categorize things and that are inevitably imperfect.

But, other than to admit to an error, Amazon did not elaborate on how the recent problem occurred, though the company did acknowledge that more than 57,000 titles were affected, including E. M. Forster’s “Maurice,” the children’s book “Heather Has Two Mommies,” and “False Colors,” a gay historical romance by Alex Beecroft. Some straight erotica and books on health and reproductive medicine also got caught in the Amazon maw.

Many readers maintained that Amazon had deliberately suppressed books about gay and lesbian subjects, and should not be trusted to display or rank books fairly in the future.

As the week wore on, responses to the blowup seemed to fall into two camps. One view held that the Twitterati had succumbed to a mob mentality, jumping to unfair conclusions about Amazon’s motives. Another camp argued that while Amazon’s intentions may not have been overtly prejudiced, the assumptions underpinning the retailer’s categorization of books were still suspect.

In one of the more frequently linked and tweeted expositions of the mea culpa camp, Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program and the author of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” wrote on his blog that he regretted having joined the Twitter outrage.

Photo
Credit Leif Parsons

“I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true,” Mr. Shirky wrote, noting that “the idea that this was an event of mainly technological propagation, rather than a coordinated bit of anti-gay bias, simply escaped me.”

Amazon had a similar problem three years ago when pro-choice critics accused the company of ideological spin after the site’s book-recommending and spell-check software started spitting out the question “did you mean adoption?” at the top of search pages where consumers plugged in the word “abortion.”

And that same year, bloggers accused Wal-Mart of racism when the company’s Web site recommended that customers who looked at a box set of movies including “Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream” and other African-American-themed titles also consider a DVD collection of “Planet of the Apes.” Wal-Mart apologized and removed its cross-selling software, citing a poorly designed system.

“Whenever something like this happens, people immediately blame it on conspiracy,” said Ed Lazowska, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. “There are all kinds of ways for things to go wrong that are what I would call unintended consequences of either computer algorithms or human behavior.”

Critics were skeptical of such easy exoneration. Even those who backed off from accusing Amazon of outright bigotry argued that the mishap was not a neutral mistake. “The ethical issue with algorithms and information systems generally is that they make choices about what information to use, or display or hide, and this makes them very powerful,” Mary Hodder, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, wrote in a blog post on TechCrunch.com. “These choices are never made in a vacuum and reflect both the conscious and subconscious assumptions and ideas of their creators.”

Preconceptions drive all kinds of taxonomies. Long before the Internet came along, the Dewey Decimal System that has dominated libraries for more than a century amply reflected the cultural biases of its time. More than half of the 10 subcategories devoted to religion, for example, catalog Christian subjects.

The Dewey Decimal System represented “thinking that truth lies in figuring out the single correct way of ordering our categories,” said David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Now we seem to pretty much agree that any single ordering of categories is going to express cultural and political biases, and that’s exactly where truth cannot lie.”

That Amazon’s error focused on gay and lesbian themed books made questions of bias all the more salient. “People have very good reason to believe that companies will behave homophobically,” said Nancy Baym, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas. “There is a lot of homophobia out there.”

She wondered if the lessons now being drawn from the episode would be as potent if, say, cookbooks had been the group that lost its sales rankings last weekend.

“People would have just said ‘what’s wrong with Amazon?’ ” Ms. Baym said. “People wouldn’t have said ‘they’re censoring cooking!’ ”

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