Amazon isn't evil

Commerce Anyone who reads my Twitter feed will know that I've been following the #amazonfail debarckle over the Easter weekend (posting my own knee jerk reaction here to the reaction late on Easter evening before thinking better of it and deleting it from the blog but not before it turned up in the RSS feed). Throughout (or at least since my own knee jerk reaction to my own knee jerk reaction about the knee jerk reaction) I've believed four things:

(1) Amazon isn't evil or homophobic because ...
(2) Someone at Amazon probably pressed the wrong button
(3) Some people were jumping to conclusions based on rumour and hearsay. Was it a hacker? Was it...
(4) Amazon needed to release a statement about it in order to offset the rumour and hearsay

Overnight (if you're in the uk) Amazon finally released a statement and an explanation is at hand:

"After hearing from people on the inside at Amazon, I am convinced it was in fact, a 'glitch,'" he says on his Web site. "Well, more like user error--some idiot editing code for one of the many international versions of Amazon mixed up the difference between 'adult' and 'erotic' and 'sexuality.' All the sites are tied together, so editing one affected all for blacklisting, and ta-da, you get the situation."

(2) led to (3) because (4) didn't happen quickly enough. So there was an #amazonfail but not of the magnitude some of us thought.