Monday, February 10, 2020

Amazon censors books for political reasons

The NY Times reports:
Amazon is quietly canceling its Nazis.

Over the past 18 months, the retailer has removed two books by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as several titles by George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Amazon has also prohibited volumes like “The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure of World Power” and “A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind.” ...

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been roiled in recent years by controversies that pit freedom of speech against offensive content. ...

When Amazon drops a book from its store, it is as if it never existed. A recent Google search for David Duke’s “My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding” on Amazon yielded a link to a picture of an Amazon employee’s dog. Amazon sellers call these dead ends “dog pages.” ...

In 1998, when Amazon was an ambitious start-up, its founder, Jeff Bezos, said, “We want to make every book available — the good, the bad and the ugly.” Customers reviews, he said, would “let truth loose.”
So now they are afraid of what David Duke has to say?

There is a very large amount of junk and misinformation on Amazon and Youtube. The management does not take action against those titles. They only take down items where they have an ideological disagreement, and where they are worried that the items might be persuasive.

Here is one of my favorite quotes:
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

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