Under the U.S. Constitution, the federal government is prohibited from censoring speech.
It often tries anyway.
One of the ways, as we’ve learned, is by pressuring social media and other companies to suppress speech. Since the federal government can make life very difficult for any company, some companies are understandably reluctant to ignore such pressure.
Amazon did not. When asked by the Biden administration in the person of one Andrew Slavitt, an advisor for the White House’s COVID-19 “response team,” the company agreed to hide books critical of the COVID-19 vaccines
Among the emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee is Slavitt’s March 2, 2021, communication with Amazon complaining that “if you search for ‘vaccines’ under books, I see what comes up [books criticizing the vaccine]. . . . [I]f that’s what’s on the surface, it’s concerning.”
Amazon was reluctant to intervene “manually” to demote such books and worried privately that rigging the game against particular books because of their viewpoints might undermine the company. But it caved nonetheless, soon modifying its algorithm and advising the White House that “we did enable Do Not Promote for anti-vax books whose primary purpose is to persuade readers vaccines are unsafe or ineffective.”
Are such decisions consistent with a “consumer-centric” approach that easily allows people to find just what they’re looking for? Which is Amazon’s big
Of course not.
But as it has done so often over the years, our government was putting its thumb on the scale.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Amazon’s Wide, Flowing, Constricted River”
I loathe use of the instrumental defense of liberty as if that defense were primary. None-the-less, unjustified ideas do often become the fashion, and so long as they cannot be challenged, better ideas will not replace them.
We have seen the mainstream COVID narrative repeatedly updated, reluctantly admitting ideas that were once censored and derided. Those ideas would never have been admitted had the Trudeaus, Faucis, and Maddows of this world had the power to suppress them fully.
Tavish Cordero Kelly coined the marvelous term “Bayesian gaslighting” to describe how a gaslighting narrative is updated when evidence makes it unsustainable in its prior form.
We are still in a time of Bayesian gaslighting, with our everyday Nazis insisting that the prior narrative made good sense at the time, that the prior censorship and derision made good sense at the time, that the present narrative makes good sense now, and that the present censorship — try including “brighteon.com” in an entry or comment to Facebook — makes good sense now.
Amazon is no longer useful as a search engine for written and video information and is treading closer to no longer being useful for a true product evaluation.
Amazon is awash in shill reviews. Even though I am amongst those who on Amazon post positive reviews of some products, I don’t typically read the positive reviews; I read the negative reviews. If these negative reviews seem authentic, competent, and representative, then I steer clear of the product. Of course, some negative reviews are masked attacks by rivals; many others are foolish; and some just seem to be exceptional cases.
(For what little it’s worth, I’ve been offered a bribe to post a positive review, but did not accept it. You can trust my reviews to be honest, though you might think some of them mistaken.)