You’re right.
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- Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.- Sir John Harington,
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At some point a person has to pick a side.
If you run into a traitor in the morning, then you ran into a traitor . If you run into traitors all day then you’re the traitor.
–Some asshole
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As with social media, Amazon has become a sprawling cess pit so massive that it cannot be effectively overseen, moderated, or quality-controlled.
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Nah. That one was a glorious revolution.
But - now you brought it up - it may be that an earlier USA engendering treason might be Knut’s.
The article suggests that product listings are added to Amazon without review by Amazon, and policies are applied after-the-fact. (It’s possible I’m reading this wrong. Perhaps Amazon does review product listings and, in this case, are revising how that interpret their policies because of the criticism they face.)
It’s one thing for a video serving site that gets hours and hours of new content uploaded every minute to say it’s not feasible to manually prescreen all that content before serving it back. But I’d expect a retailer to have a human in the loop, watching out for the brand, before any new product listing goes up. It’s hard to imagine that they have the same problem of scale.
It’s also a stretch to rely on the technicality that Amazon is just acting as the marketplace and not as the retailer. Everybody says, “I got it from Amazon,” not “I got it from some third-party shop who uses Amazon as a marketplace.” Whether Amazon sells a product directly or indirectly, it’s their brand on the line. You’d think they’d care enough to check listings before they go up and not risk their reputation to automation and reactions.
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You don’t get to be the first person in history worth $100 billion by hiring people to pre-screen and validate every product that get listed on your website. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?
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Yes, I know I am.
Do you want to ban cars because some neonazi used one to run over a protester in Charlottesville?
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Adding a sarcasm tag to the original post.
Peace.
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As a person who can read, it makes me laugh when I hear this line come up.
Attempts at secession are sedition. During civil war it’s possible to commit treason during a seditious uprising if you are on the side of the rebels.
America was founded, by definition, on sedition.
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This is both annoyingly pedantic and absolutely accurate. You cheeky bastard.
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They started it.
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It’s only treason if you lose, little buddy.
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I don’t think Amazon is required to sell city flags under penalty of law.
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I’m not sure. I personally don’t care about Lynryd Skynyrd. It’s just that I’m in the habit of looking for edge cases; what Amazon is doing is an act of data classification, so I’m curious to see how well they classify things. No harm in doing that, right?
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. The basic essence of treason under English law is disloyalty to the Crown, including levying war against the sovereign. By definition, an attempt at secession using force of arms is treason. Sedition is more broadly defined as any acts inciting disaffection or rebellion, which, yes, also applies, but is distinctly the lesser charge.
That’s not at all how Amazon works. Their policy enforcement is driven somewhat by reports, but largely by bots. What that means is that when they decide to purge “Confederate flag merchandise” a lot of other stuff gets flagged—Confederate Railroad CDs, books about the Confederate flag issue, historical artwork depicting Civil War battles, or completely unrelated products that happen to have the wrong word somewhere in the description. These represent policy violations that can lead to a seller’s permanent suspension and potentially catastrophic loss of income. They’re not a company that invests in human involvement, or is able to make common sense distinctions. For example, a seller was once suspended for counterfeiting because a buyer used the word “pirate” when leaving feedback on a T-shirt of a pirate.
So it’s basically AI making political distinctions, and there’s a lot of collateral damage associated with that. Meanwhile, fascists move on to new symbols, which include various “dog whistles” designed to appear innocent to the uninitiated. Amazon may be effective at removing the most blatant displays of racism/fascism, but they won’t dare touch the most prevalent ones.
Society at large, I guess? The way I see it, the problem is that there’s an open, public market for items celebrating slavery. That isn’t an Amazon-specific problem, it’s a social problem - one which normally would require broad social action to address. But because of the monopolistic quirks of our economy, there’s actually just one corporation which can dramatically impact what’s available for sale, just by making a policy decision.
So even when they do the right thing, I have a nagging sense that there’s something dangerous about solving problems this way.
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I’m sure there still is, though I don’t want to Google it. It’s just not on Amazon anymore. How would “society at large” handle this, anyway? Are you saying it should be illegal to sell or own a confederate flag?
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