As published in seller’s guidelines, Amazon’s Offensive Products policies apply to all products except books, music, video and DVD.
But according to The Daily Wire, Amazon has increasingly been applying censorship to conservative views found in these categories. For example, a popular documentary on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was banned from their streaming service this past week. Earlier the company banned conservative Ryan Anderson’s book critical of gender theory, “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement.”
On products such as tee shirts, etc., “Amazon does not allow products that promote, incite or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views. We maintain these policies to ensure a welcoming environment for our global customers and sellers to do business while offering the widest selection of items on earth. We promote trust and respect, as well as adherence to the law.”
Amazon’s page outlines their “Content Guidelines for Books.” Under a section labeled “Offensive Content,” Amazon states that they “don’t sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive.”
According to a report by Just the News, “A review of those policies suggests that sometime in the last few months Amazon made a major change to the ways in which it moderates book content on its servers, imposing a much stricter standard on books than it had previously done,” the report said. It appears the company recently added so-called “hate speech” to their guidelines on book platforming and is amping up their censorship of the “offensive.”
Books, music, video and DVDs would normally fall under a different standard than t-shirts. Amazon says, “As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word is important, including content that may be considered objectionable.” But the guidelines now include the ambiguous, “hate speech”.
Daily Wire podcast host and conservative author Matt Walsh warned that the designation from Amazon broadened to include conservative views, as it seems to be leaning, could lead to the potential “end of conservative books.”
