The Problem
Amazon, the world’s titan of e-commerce, logistics, data storage, and media, also peddles endless amounts of sexual exploitation. As a social media platform, Amazon’s Twitch is rife with sexual harassment, predatory grooming, and child sexual abuse. As an online retailer, Amazon is in the business of selling incest-themed porn, sex dolls, photography books with eroticized child nudity, pornographic magazines, and more. As a media creator, Amazon Prime Video inserts unnecessary, gratuitous nudity and simulated sex scenes into much of its original programming, while providing faulty parental controls. Amazon S3 and Amazon Web Services are also host to thousands of hardcore violent pornography and prostitution websites.
There is no doubt that Amazon is one of the most powerful companies in the world, not only influencing global economic markets, but also greatly influencing the goods we buy, the media we consume, and businesses small and large. Many maintain that the elite “FANG,” the major four tech companies Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, are dominating the world. As for Amazon’s part in this, its net sales revenue topped $135 billion in 2016. Forty-four percent of web shoppers go directly to Amazon for product searches. As a bookstore, Amazon has an estimated 3.4 million books for sale and over twenty-five million people use Amazon Instant Video and with their creation of original content, this is growing quickly.
While we applaud Amazon for 2020 improvements of removing full-body and childlike sex dolls and for finally rolling out parental controls for Prime Video, it continues to be an online marketplace rife with sexual exploitation.
See Our Requests For Improvement
We request the following improvements:
Prime Video Parental Controls
While Amazon rolled out major improvements for safety in Prime Video in 2020, we request Amazon address some of these remaining concerns:
- These features do not work if you are accessing Prime Video from Xbox.
- Kids can just move from profile to profile without a pin. (This was the same problem Netflix had and fixed thanks to our advocacy in 2020.) The only way around this is to have the strictest age restrictions on all profiles until Amazon fixes this.
- If you have downloaded mature rated content on any of your devices to watch when you’re not connected, it will be available to all profiles (read: to kids) no matter your settings.
- Ironically, none of these features when set at the account owner level will work on Amazon’s own Fire TV, Fire Tablet, or Fire phone. Users will have to manually set parental controls for each of these systems separately, which is just redundant and complicated for already overburdened caregivers. (Here’s how for Fire Tablet, for Fire TV, for Fire Phone.)
Amazon Studios & Prime Video
- Stop making films with gratuitous amounts of nudity and sexual violence. Unfortunately, a sample survey of third-party reviews of Amazon Prime original content shows that 66% of it contains nudity, 82% of which is female, and 36% of the surveyed Amazon Prime original shows contain simulated sex.
Amazon’s Twitch
- Develop and implement lockable parental controls, so parents can monitor and streamline their child’s experience on Twitch and ensure basic safety is being met.
- Develop more robust age-gating features to protect children on Twitch, including filtering and blocking streams with mature game ratings and/or themes.
- Ban minor-aged accounts from sending or receiving money through Twitch’s donation and bits feature.
- Disable the Whisper feature on minor-aged accounts.
- Automatically default minor-aged accounts to the highest level of safety and privacy available on the Twitch platform.
- Require, not suggest, that streamers provide mature content warnings on their channel if they broadcast content intended for adults.
- Provide education to all users and parents on the potential harms and risks associated with exploitation and abuse on Twitch, and feature prominent reporting processes on all forms of Twitch’s interface.
- Create and feature PSAs about safety on the Twitch platform.
Prime (Online Retailer)
- Stop selling sexual exploitation and abuse. It’s unacceptable that you are selling sex trafficking how-to books, disembodied sex dolls, photography books with “eroticized” child nudity, incest- and racist-themed written pornography, pornographic magazines and DVD’s, and misogynistic clothing items, and more.
- Better ensure that items are categorized correctly so that sexually explicit content is not showing up in general, innocent searches.
Kindle & Publisher
- Reject books with themes sexualizing and normalizing incest, racism, sex with children and teens, and extreme sexual violence.
- Ensure “adult” books are actually tagged as “adult” and prohibited from surfacing in general search results as your policy seems to indicate should be happening.
Amazon Web Services
- Refuse to host websites that facilitate the purchase of human beings for sex and abuse
WARNING: The pornographic images taken from Amazon have been blurred, but are still suggestive. There is also graphic text descriptions shown in these sections.
POSSIBLE TRIGGER.
Proof
Amazon Prime Video & Original Content
** We applaud Amazon's move in 2020 to finally implement parental control options for Prime Video. Learn about these much needed improvements and some of the remaining problems on our blog here. **
Amazon’s status as a sales and television giant is no secret, but what is less obvious is the complacency with which it treats video content and ratings.
Amazon Prime Video, a service offering unlimited television streaming to members, brings these shows directly into millions of American homes every day, many of them produced by Amazon itself. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos recently reported that Prime now has over 100 million subscribers. Unfortunately, Amazon often produces original programming portraying gratuitous nudity, graphic sexual acts, and even graphic depictions of sexual assault. Many of Amazon’s most popular and most heavily-advertised original shows are rated TV-MA (mature audiences only) frequently containing graphic sex scenes, nudity, and violence. Amazon contributes to a culture of toxic sexual pressure in the media industry by producing content that requires actors to do nude scenes.
Unfortunately, a sample survey of third-party reviews of Amazon Prime original content shows that 66% of it contains nudity, 82% of which is female, and 36% of the surveyed Amazon Prime original shows contain simulated sex.
In the age of #MeToo and the rising problems of male sexual entitlement to women’s bodies, producing such material is socially irresponsible.
We are calling on Amazon Studios to improve its parental controls so that they are more easily visible and accessible for parents and to consider policies to produce less sexually objectifying content.
While streaming can often provide hours of quality family entertainment, a recent analysis by NCOSE's team of 115 third-party reviews by Common Sense Media of TV shows exclusively owned by Amazon indicated that Amazon Studios has several problems:
Extensive Objectification and Exploitation of Women in Original Content
Though Amazon original content shows employ diverse themes, span through time and space, and explore various genres, they seem to have one common denominator—nudity. Amazon is clearly no stranger to the economic benefits of nudity in media, which they have included in 66% of their original series. That’s right, according to third-party reviews, two out of every three Amazon original series will at some point display nudity. What perhaps is most striking in this statistic is the blatant sexism that the referenced objectification follows. An astronomical 87% of cases incorporated female nudity, whereas male nudity was found in only 13%. This is a common trend in pornographic material, as objectification often disproportionately targets women.
Ambiguous Ratings
The second observation made clear in Amazon-exclusive content was the complacent ambiguity with which Amazon treats its rating system.
Amazon patterns ratings for their shows after the TV Organization TV Parental Guides to create four rating categories—General, Family, Teen, and Mature. With the use of these categories, however, comes a crucial omission. TV Organization TV Parental Guides include content labels to warn parents of what may be included in the show. Recall the little black box in the corner of the screen of TV shows—a rating is posted, and underneath letters indicating content (for example, D for suggestive dialogue, V for violence, and S for sexual situations).
Amazon does not provide adequate content warnings. Not only this, but they provide no information whatsoever on their site regarding reasons for ratings. This means that a TV-MA series could feature anything from “crude or indecent language” to “explicit sexual activity”, but which of these actually exists on the show remains a mystery.
In other words, a parent approving a series for a teenage child will have no indication as to whether said child will be exposed to “indecent language” or a full-blown sex scene complete with extensive nudity.
The only option for parents in such a predicament would be to visit separate sites such as Common Sense Media to read reviews written by other parents; however, much of Amazon’s exclusive content cannot be found on such sites.
A sampling of Amazon Prime content that includes graphic sexual content:
- When Night Is Falling originally received an NC-17 rating for its graphic sex scenes
- Obsession (2015) has an unrated, sexually graphic version streaming on Amazon Prime
- Bound (2015) is on Amazon Prime and often described as softcore porn by reviewers
- The Handmaiden (2016) is on Amazon Prime and is unrated though the sex scenes would have required a NC-17 rating at minimum.
- The Case of Unfaithful Klara (2009)
- Come Undone (2010)
- Extase (2009)
Plans to Expand Graphic Sexual Content
In 2017, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos mandated a programming shift at Amazon Studios: Bring me “Game of Thrones.”
They have moved towards just that. Amazon increasingly inserts gratuitous scenes of nudity and sexual violence in their Amazon Original content (and has a long trend of recommending those pieces right next to kids’ content).
Amazon might also be gearing up to hypersexualize the fantasy world of one of the 20th century’s most popular books among children and adults alike—with over 150 million copies sold in more than 35 languages—J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy series, The Lord of the Rings.
Amazon Studios has issued casting calls for actors who “must be comfortable with nudity.” Furthermore, Amazon Studios has hired an “intimacy coordinator,” a job described by SAG-AFTRA as “an advocate, a liaison between actors and production … in regard to nudity and simulated sex.” On top of all that, Amazon Studios has also brought on a consulting producer, Bryan Cogman, who formerly served as writer for HBO’s Game of Thrones where he helped develop some of the most grotesque rape and incest scenes in the series.
More information here.
Take Action
Help educate others and demand change by sharing these on social media:
Recommended Further Reading:
Updates
Progress
While we believe that BigTech has a responsibility to proactively create safe spaces online (especially for children) without being pressured to do so by advocacy organizations and parents, we still appreciate when corporations make positive changes. We thank Amazon Prime Video for finally giving parents some control about what kind of media their young
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