They are complying so they can do business in the respective countries. Not really news.
They could at least inform customers about the censorship and not sweep it under the rug:
> among all of the restricted products identified by this study, none presented a message to the user explaining that the items were unavailable due to regulatory reasons. Instead, each item was communicated as either being “currently unavailable”, “temporarily out of stock”, or that “this item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location”.
What's unclear about "this item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location"?
I get the same message for products that just don't have am affordable delivery route. It's not the right message for this IMO
They don’t need to use inaccurate keyword matching (“rainbow mentos”) or opaque messaging in order to comply. The problem existing doesn’t mean the solution is good.
How else would you comply with a policy that uses inaccurate keyword matching to ban media?
It's not like middle eastern countries only have a list of books that are banned. They have that for sure, but they also have a blanket ban on LGBT stuff as well as other "obscenities", "things that don't fit in their culture", "political books", "dangerous ideologies", etc. Most of that is left up to the discretion of the customs inspector your package happens to land on. I don't know if Amazon has some formal agreement with those countries (and it won't surprise me if they do). But It also might be the headache of dealing with items confiscated at customs. I agree on the opaque messaging. But I suspect it's less headache to say "Sorry item out of stock" than to say "This item doesn't ship to Saudi Arabia" then have to go on a fight with the customer who is gonna argue "no it's not banned"
There’s an unknowable here. Maybe a customs officer in an ME country crafted a poor regex while processing a data dump of billions of Amazon product listings. But my bet is that it was an Amazon employee, and the customs officer doesn’t know what regex is, and would hopefully recognize that mentos are benign.
Not really sure what makes you even think something like that could happen. A regex is far too specific for such things. Morality laws in the Middle East are extremely vague and flexible to apply on whatever. The rules communicated to Amazon are probably in the form of “nothing that’s morally obscene”, “nothing that’s against god’s nature”, “nothing against our culture”.
We were traveling to Saudi Arabia in the 90s with another family. They confiscated their son’s Pokémon cards because Pokémon was satanic. In the 2000s I was traveling to Egypt and the customs officer demanded explain what a book I had was about. The book cover had a sheriff badge on it, and the office insisted that’s a book about Israel. I learned then that you’ll never see a 6-point star in any form in any Arab country because they view it as an Israel/Zionist thing regardless of the context. Last time I was in Saudi Arabia was in 2016 and they held me at the airport because I had a board game called Mysterium that looked kinda spooky. I travelled there many other times without any incidents. It’s 100% luck of the draw on the customs officer you get.
Things like that going to a customs officer who has to open a random package and inspect it have a chance of being randomly confiscated. Certainly anything that even hints or winks at LGBT stuff is highly illegal there which is what this article is about.
If a book distributor is going to be criticised for censorship, we should criticise it for voluntary censorship (where it can legally sell a book but makes a voluntary policy decision not to do so), rather than legally mandated censorship under the laws of whatever country. The principle is you have greater responsibility for decisions you make in full freedom than decisions you make under legal coercion. This analysis misses the mark because all the cases it cites are effectively legally mandated censorship, and it ignores all the cases of voluntary censorship
Why do you think the authors are aiming to produce "news"?
Fair point, though we did view it from a site called "Hacker News" so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect these are "news" stories. I think you're both right