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
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
The Dirty Dozen List has fostered incredible change—from legislation drafted to safety policies and features introduced and more.
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