It looks as if both Audible and Amazon have pulled the book from their site. They did not issue any public statement about how the book came to be recommended in a featured sale selection over the holidays. I'm not sure what the process is, or how they plan to avoid promoting similar books in the future. Are they going to have human beings check algorithmic recommendations? That seems like the best bet, but who knows?
Since Audible.com was bought by Amazon twelve years ago, it's probably been futile to expect that they would refuse to carry Nazi content. After all, their parent company still sells the Turner Diaries despite organized efforts to get them to stop. I've been a member of Audible since 2002, and I really enjoy audiobooks, which I listen to when travelling and doing chores. I usually listen to about 12 each year, which is why I have one of those memberships that includes an audiobook each month.
I was curious to read that the Audible CEO, Don Katz, was a student of Ralph Ellison's at NYU, and attributes much of his thinking to Ellison's mentorship. In 2018, he proudly posted a link to Philip Roth's visit to the Audible studio in Newark. One wonders what Ellison and Roth would think today, if they saw the book Day of the Rope a fan-fiction fantasy based on the vision of the Turner Diaries, not just being sold on Audible, but being featured as part of a year-end "Holiday Relief" 2-for-1 sale. The sale is over now, but you can see the screen-shot from the promotion below. I included the first review "pure trash" in the picture because that reader is correct about this book, which should not be featured in a sale.
My best guess is that this promotion happened because of an algorithm. After all, Youtube's algorithm has become a notorious ingredient in online radicalization. What it looks like is that this book got a large number of positive reviews from Nazis who organized to build it up through the algorithms. Some of these reviews refer to it as a "guide" for the boogaloo - the current white supremacist plan for a 2nd Civil War inside the United States. which makes the inclusion of the book in the sale even more concerning. One would expect that a company based on the values of literacy and human understanding would seek to find out what happened and would have already taken action to remedy it quickly. It should not take a large social media or letter writing campaign to get them to do so. There are a lot of other worse things happening in the world right now than this one small thing, but it's troubling to me that Audible.com's reaction hasn't been to swiftly, clearly - and publicly repudiate this piece of pure racist trash. Instead, the first response to my complaint has been to say that "we try to be neutral." But promoting a book like this one isn't neutral, it's incendiary. On the good side, the email I got from customer service said that a "team" was handling this with utmost priority. I hope to find out soon what that means, as Audible has remained entirely silent about this on their social media accounts, despite the fact that several people have liked or retweeted and tagged them in posts related to this promotion, with a number of people saying that they are cancelling subscriptions as a result.
Lesson number one in new media literacy ought to be not to let algorithms do all your thinking. Lessons from Ellison and Roth would likely be that sometimes even business people ought to maintain some principles. If you can't see the problem with a promotion of a white supremacist terrorist manual, what problem can you see with anything?
Since Audible.com was bought by Amazon twelve years ago, it's probably been futile to expect that they would refuse to carry Nazi content. After all, their parent company still sells the Turner Diaries despite organized efforts to get them to stop. I've been a member of Audible since 2002, and I really enjoy audiobooks, which I listen to when travelling and doing chores. I usually listen to about 12 each year, which is why I have one of those memberships that includes an audiobook each month.
I was curious to read that the Audible CEO, Don Katz, was a student of Ralph Ellison's at NYU, and attributes much of his thinking to Ellison's mentorship. In 2018, he proudly posted a link to Philip Roth's visit to the Audible studio in Newark. One wonders what Ellison and Roth would think today, if they saw the book Day of the Rope a fan-fiction fantasy based on the vision of the Turner Diaries, not just being sold on Audible, but being featured as part of a year-end "Holiday Relief" 2-for-1 sale. The sale is over now, but you can see the screen-shot from the promotion below. I included the first review "pure trash" in the picture because that reader is correct about this book, which should not be featured in a sale.
My best guess is that this promotion happened because of an algorithm. After all, Youtube's algorithm has become a notorious ingredient in online radicalization. What it looks like is that this book got a large number of positive reviews from Nazis who organized to build it up through the algorithms. Some of these reviews refer to it as a "guide" for the boogaloo - the current white supremacist plan for a 2nd Civil War inside the United States. which makes the inclusion of the book in the sale even more concerning. One would expect that a company based on the values of literacy and human understanding would seek to find out what happened and would have already taken action to remedy it quickly. It should not take a large social media or letter writing campaign to get them to do so. There are a lot of other worse things happening in the world right now than this one small thing, but it's troubling to me that Audible.com's reaction hasn't been to swiftly, clearly - and publicly repudiate this piece of pure racist trash. Instead, the first response to my complaint has been to say that "we try to be neutral." But promoting a book like this one isn't neutral, it's incendiary. On the good side, the email I got from customer service said that a "team" was handling this with utmost priority. I hope to find out soon what that means, as Audible has remained entirely silent about this on their social media accounts, despite the fact that several people have liked or retweeted and tagged them in posts related to this promotion, with a number of people saying that they are cancelling subscriptions as a result.
Lesson number one in new media literacy ought to be not to let algorithms do all your thinking. Lessons from Ellison and Roth would likely be that sometimes even business people ought to maintain some principles. If you can't see the problem with a promotion of a white supremacist terrorist manual, what problem can you see with anything?
