Censorship online: Amazon US store restricts book sales to multiple countries

E-commerce giant Amazon is publicly committed to respecting human rights and freedom of expression, but new research has revealed that its American storefront is restricting the shipments of books on sensitive subjects to multiple countries.

It turns out that if you live in certain countries, you won’t be able to order certain books from Amazon’s US storefront – especially if they revolve around sensitive subjects like erotica, Christianity, the occult, and LGBTIQ issues.

According to The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a laboratory focusing on the openness and security of the internet, Amazon deploys a special system on its “amazon.com” storefront to restrict shipments of certain products to specific regions.

While researchers found more than 17,000 such products, the most common product category restricted was books, especially the ones related to the aforementioned subjects.

The regions affected by this censorship were the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and many other Middle Eastern countries as well as Brunei Darussalam, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles, and Zambia, The Citizen Lab said in the study.

Amazon uses various tricks to justify why restricted products cannot be shipped, such as error messages alleging that an item is temporarily out of stock.

In misleading its customers and censoring books, Amazon is violating its public commitments to both LGBTIQ and, more broadly, human rights, researchers say.

Of course, Amazon needs to follow the laws of the country buyers are purchasing items from. So, if a citizen of Saudi Arabia wants to buy an item that is deemed illegal by authorities in Riyadh, there’s not much the US e-commerce giant can do.

Amazon’s own shipping restrictions FAQ provides some guidance on why certain products may be restricted, including the need to “comply with all laws and regulations and with Amazon policies” and that Amazon may be “restricted from shipping to your location due to government import/export requirements, manufacturer restrictions, or warranty issues”.

In China, for example, Amazon removed all customer ratings and reviews for a book of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speeches and writings.

The company claimed it was following local laws and regulations at the time of the 2021 incident. But Reuters spoke to a source close to Amazon’s dealings with Beijing, and the person said: “I think the issue was anything under five stars.”

The Citizen Lab’s researchers point out that Amazon is still failing to reveal specifically what categories of content it restricts to comply with the demands of authoritarian governments.

Moreover, The Citizen Lab said in the study that the censorship is at times overly broad or miscategorized. Examples include the restriction of books relating to breast cancer or recipe books invoking “food porn” euphemisms, Nietzsche’s Gay Science, and “rainbow” Mentos candy.

According to the Citizen Lab, Amazon could address concerns raised in the report by providing transparent and accurate notifications to customers when products are unavailable due to legal restrictions of the destination region.

The firm could then inform users of the relevant law(s), provide them a mechanism to flag products that have been improperly classified as being illegal, and regularly review the regions to which censorship is applied.