Online retail giant Amazon has quietly changed a policy regarding sales of books to remove item that contain or promote alleged hate speech. Largely unnoticed by the public, the issue became news when a conservative author found his book on transgenderism removed from the site.
According to Just the News, “Amazon this week yanked ‘When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement’ from its main web store, its Kindle servers, and its audiobook lineup with no explanation, even as the book had been available on the site for three years with no apparent controversy.
The reason now appears in the updated policy language of Amazon that notes, “We don’t sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech.” However, Amazon had not previously posted policies regarding hate speech concerning books or periodicals.
Ryan T. Anderson, the author of “When Harry Became Sally,” reports he was given no explanation for the book’s removal. Anderson’s publisher Encounter Books has now released a statement, noting in part:
“If Amazon, which controls most of the book sales in America, has decided to delist a book with which some of its functionaries disagree, that is an unconscionable assault on free speech. It will have a chilling effect on the publishing industry and the free circulation of ideas. It must not be left to stand unchallenged.”
To be clear, Anderson is not a late-night basement blogger. Dr. Anderson is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Founding Editor of Public Discourse, an online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. His research has been cited in two US Supreme Court cases.
However, Dr. Anderson’s education and research apparently aren’t enough for Amazon. If you want to address certain topics from a conservative perspective, such as gender identity, then they can simply make your book disappear.
Given the inordinate level of control Amazon already has on the book industry in America, this is certainly a serious free speech issue.
What’s next? No more Bible sales on Amazon since it includes God creating people male and female? No more Charlie Brown or Muppets books because they are not woke enough for cancel culture?
One scary addition is that Amazon claims to moderate book content with “a combination of machine learning, automation, and dedicated teams of human reviewers.” If not already, there may be a point when books are automatically scanned and removed based on certain keywords, similar to the algorithms utilized by Twitter and Facebook to delete certain posts and comments.
If so, free speech is gone in America. Freedom of press, freedom of expression, and more are all included in how people write and publish content. If the nation’s leading bookseller can pick and choose content based on alleged hate speech, there will no longer be a voice for many Americans.
Will there be a time when a conservative Amazon becomes necessary? If Trump is looking for his next business idea, here’s one that could use The Art of the Deal, especially once Trump’s books become targeted for removal at Amazon.
