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.