It’s all gone horribly wrong over at Amazon this weekend. It seems that someone (or something) at the online bookstore has celebrated Easter with a censorious purge on any books that contain themes that might make Daily Mail readers uncomfortable. Anything from the biography of Ellen Degeneres to “The Well of Loneliness” by Radclyffe Hall has vanished from the rankings system on the grounds of “adult” content (Hall’s steamy sex scene consists only of the line “…that night they were not divided”, which is about as filthy as it got for Victorian lesbians until Sarah Waters’ “Tipping the Velvet”, also stripped of its ranking in the past couple of days). Non-sexual titles on such topics as gay parenting have been de-ranked, whereas bizarrely, all those dreadful religious books about “curing” homosexuality remain.

More details here.

An interesting take on it here.

Also, the slightly more sinister conspiracy theory here.

Still, whether policy-change, meta-glitch, or the successful manipulation of a software weakness by one or more right-wing nutters, it needs to be sorted out. Now.