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Censorship by Amazon - how widespread and to what end?


There have been many published complaints about Amazon, but this problem was quite unexpected. I recently received an email from Amazon concerning marketing and sales of Betrayed. The email stated that "on review," Betrayed "was found to contain material which we do not allow in Germany as a result, this content will not be offered through the European marketplace." A link was provided to content guidelines, but the guidelines made no mention of requirements for Germany. Despite requests for clarification, no further information has been provided. This leaves many unanswered questions, among them (1) Why is Amazon worried about offending German sensitivities by marketing a historically accurate account that details Nazi war crimes? (2) Is it only the German audience that Amazon is "protecting" or does this policy extend to books sold domestically? How widespread is this practice? (3) Is a living person involved, or [as the sentence structure suggests] are these decisions made by an AI based on some algorithm triggered by the combination of, for example, "Nazi war crimes" and "holocaust?" I will update this posting when/if more information becomes available.


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