Amazon has forums, including a “politics” forum.
Recently, they banned many users.
The first ban duration is: permanent.
That itself is quite wrong and not clearly stated in the rules, but there’s something I think is really an outrage:
Not only are they suddenly banning people permanently, but if they do, they are deleting all posts that the user has made — which can be thousands over years.
Nothing in the rules I’ve seen mentions that possibility, and I think it’s an inappropriate action.
I won’t get into the subjective issue of the merit of the bans — the forum consensus is that some are well deserved, and others are of people who clearly there’s no reason to ban.
People are making comments such as that the selections make no sense, that they feel they could be next; one said an alternate account he hasn’t used in years was banned.
People banned report they all received the same forum letter, saying simply Amazon viewed something they posted as “spiteful” — oh, the irony given their action — and there’s no discussion.
As nearly as people can guess, they seem to have done a search for people who have posts “downvoted” — but the forum has long recognized a poster or a few who have “socks” that put multiple downvotes on posts from liberals regularly. It was just ignored, because it didn’t matter — until now, it does.
This is just to alert people to “forum administration done badly”. I’ve never heard of such bad policies/actions on forums before.
If people needed one more reason to consider not patronizing Amazon, in addition to their issues such as treatment of workers (see link below), and tax avoidance, perhaps this is it.
I even contacted Jeff Bezos’ office to criticize the policy — jeff@amazon.com — and they stand by it.
It’s hard not to shop at Amazon. I just saw that remarkably, 52% of their US customers have “Prime” — a membership costing $99/year. But they are making it hard TO shop there.
I find the actions they are taking to be negligent and harmful, and irresponsible — and I’m a big advocate of legitimate forum moderation.
Banning people permanently and deleting years of posts is not good customer service, to say the least. Worker mistreatment, tax avoidance, and much more are problems.
For example, I’ve seen many reports of people who were banned not from the forums, but from shopping at Amazon — again, permanently — for returning multiple damaged products.
(The issue isn’t any single return — they give great service on damaged deliveries — but apparently if an unstated quantity of such problem is exceeded).
www.salon.com/…
www.alternet.org/…