Do we have an actual answer?

[velvetpage]

Could it really be this simple? Nutshell version: a programmer in France puts a ban on all things erotic. Except that in France, the word they use for erotic is "adulte." He understandably translated that as "adult," which put in place a code that was meant to be applied only to erotica - on 57 000 books ranging from the LGBT ones, to the sex and disability ones, to health textbooks, right around the world.

Comments

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

I know from a former employee that Amazon is or was a very Perl centric IT shop. Not only could there by a keyword mistranslation, but there could also be a Regular Expression failure that turned a minor metadata mess up into a full fledged fiasco. I can totally see this happening from my own experience trying to apply changes to a great many records in production databases. Between that and an expression that's one character too greedy, you can match way more than you intend in any filter.

[stress-kitten.livejournal.com]

I was explaining this to the hubby and his expression was priceless. He works with databases all the time, constructs them, maintains them, etc., and as he took on the world-wide ramifications of this his eyes were widening. Heh.

He also pities them, because they're going to have to go through all books in their system labelled "erotic" now and check to make sure they're properly flagged. They can't do a blanket fix, because that will put genuine erotica up on their general search pages. *grins*

He also commented that this was an interesting way to find out just how far GLBT issues have come, and how organised the internet is now, without anyone really suffering for it in the long run. People were ticked, but with it being a simple translation error, there'll probably be no long-term damage. But you can bet all large online companies will have sat up and taken notice.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

It has also had the tidy side-effect of questioning whether all things LGBT should be classified as adult - whether society has a double standard when it comes to LGBT issues as opposed to straight romance. A fic writer on my list is checking the tags on a lot of her fics to find out if she herself, a lesbian, has been unconsciously deeming all slash as more adult than all hetero romance.

[morpheus0013.livejournal.com]

Yes, the error can and likely is that simple. The problem is how much of a cluster it causes. Sometimes it's the smallest error that causes the biggest issues. I refer you to the Mars Rover incident, wherein someone switched out metrics and American standard and buried the sucker in the planet. Oops.