{"id":2201,"date":"2010-12-02T11:45:26","date_gmt":"2010-12-02T18:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/jon\/?p=2201"},"modified":"2010-12-02T11:45:26","modified_gmt":"2010-12-02T18:45:26","slug":"calls-to-boycott-amazon-over-wikileaks-amazonfail-2-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/2010\/12\/02\/calls-to-boycott-amazon-over-wikileaks-amazonfail-2-0\/","title":{"rendered":"Calls to Boycott Amazon over Wikileaks: #amazonfail 2.0?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Boycott<\/a>Heading into the busiest shopping time of the year, Amazon is suddenly facing threats of a boycott over censoring Wikileaks.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Seems like a good time to dust off the #amazonfail hashtag.<\/p>\n

It started last week, after a hacker took one of Wikileaks’ sites down with a relatively weak attack.\u00c2\u00a0 Wikileaks moved their online base to Amazon, which from a technology perspective makes a lot of sense: their services are reliable and very scalable.\u00c2\u00a0 So it was all good.\u00c2\u00a0 Briefly.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, after a public request from Senator Lieberman (and rumors of pressure from DHS), Amazon shut Wikileaks’ sites down<\/a> for “unspecified violations” of their terms of use.\u00c2\u00a0 I think EFF’s Kevin Bankston speaks for a lot of us when he describes it as “disappointing”.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, there are calls for a boycott.\u00c2\u00a0 From Austria, Kurier has a great screenshot in Wut weil Amazon Wikileaks fallen lie\u00c3\u0178<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Seattle Weekly<\/em> has a good roundup<\/a> including links to the Facebook page<\/a> and the #amazonfail<\/strong> hashtag.<\/p>\n

Hey wait a second.<\/p>\n

Where have I heard that before?<\/p>\n

Back in 2009, Amazon removed several thousand books written by lesbian, gays,\u00c2\u00a0 feminists,\u00c2\u00a0 and people with disabilities from their bestseller lists.\u00c2\u00a0 For a few days, the Twitter hashtag #amazonfail was the hotbed of online organizing: sharing links, quick communications, and getting visibility. Amazon’s stock plunged at the threat of a boycott, although quickly recovered thanks to a timely report on Kindle sales.<\/p>\n

\"amazon.failThe National Coalition Against Censorship’s flowchart<\/a>, Nancy Johnston What I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve learned from Amazonfail<\/a> on Read Street<\/em>, and Mary Hodder’s Why Amazon didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just have a glitch<\/a> on TechCrunch<\/em> give some different perspectives on what happened then.\u00c2\u00a0 My roundup in #amazonfail and we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not done yet<\/a> has a lot more links if you’re interested.<\/p>\n

The two key takeaways, though, is that the threat of a boycott sparked a strong market reaction then — and a lot of smart people spent time thinking about what it would take to make a boycott work.<\/p>\n

The timing’s disastrous for Amazon.\u00c2\u00a0 A lot of people still haven’t done their last-minute shopping yet.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 True, they’ll also get some extra business from people who support their stance; I suspect the Limbaugh and Lieberman families and fans will be doing a lot of their Christmas shopping at Amazon this year.\u00c2\u00a0 But in this economic climate it’s a lot easier to say “I’m going to buy from somebody else” than it is to say “I’m going to spend more on books, DVDs, and Kindles than I had planned” so the balance favors the Wikileaks side.<\/p>\n

I don’t know how much of their business comes from Europe and other areas where there’s already a lot of anger against the US over the Wikileaks cables.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iPad, and the Android tablets that are coming out are good alternatives to Kindles — and I bet there are some European- and Asian-based book readers that people who really want to send a message could buy.\u00c2\u00a0 So a boycott could get a lot of support.<\/p>\n

We shall see.\u00c2\u00a0 If I were Amazon, or one of their investors, I’d be pretty nervous right now.<\/p>\n

for an excellent discussion of Wikileaks and Julian Assange’s “theory of change”, I strongly recommend Aaron Bady’s Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; \u00e2\u20ac\u0153To destroy this invisible government\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/a> on zunguzungu and his followup comment here<\/a>.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Facebook page Image via Kurier
\namazon.fail Image via Women’s Media Center<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heading into the busiest shopping time of the year, Amazon is suddenly facing threats of a boycott over censoring Wikileaks.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Seems like a good time to dust off the #amazonfail hashtag. It started last week, after a hacker took one of Wikileaks’ sites down with a relatively weak attack.\u00c2\u00a0 Wikileaks moved their online base to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,14,16],"tags":[17,25,325,350,400],"class_list":["post-2201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political","category-social-sciences","category-tales-from-the-net","tag-amazonfail","tag-activism","tag-social-networks","tag-tales-from-the-net","tag-wikileaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}