Amazon says that it deleting the sales ranks of many many books that are marketed to or are about gays, lesbians, transpeople and or have the word “sex” in it was an error . Who or what caused the error is still out.

One theory is that a lone hacker is behind the mess.

Weev says he organized an army of off-shore computer users to make a bunch of fake Amazon accounts and flag all the gay and lesbian books they could as inappropriate. Also, he got several friends with high-trafficked websites to embed an iframe code that made their visitors automatically send the flags without their knowledge.

The issue with this theory is that some of the sales ranking deletions go all the way back to February.

There is also the theory that a French employee (blame the French!) misunderstood the term “adult”—which refers to porn stuff in Amazon’s system—with “erotic” and “sexuality.”

Regardless if it was a glitch, a hack, right wing organizing, or just bad decision making, Amazon.com has apparently removed the feature that lets users flag books as “inappropriate.”

Via / Gawker (I know, I’m ashamed I read that site too), Consumerist