Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has defended his decision to continue selling a controversial anti-Semitic movie that landed Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving in hot water.
At the Dealbook conference in New York on Wednesday, Jassi insisted that Hebrews to Negroes: Awakening Black America does not directly provoke hate for the film’s stay on the site.
“Trying to determine what content is hateful — we don’t provide access to customers,” Jassi told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. “We have hundreds of millions of customers with different perspectives.”
The CEO said: “If you have content whose primary purpose is not to promote hate or to give negative traits to people, it’s going to be a lot more difficult and a lot more slippery if we take a lot of that out of the store. .”
The answer intrigued Sorkin, who is Jewish and said the film could spread anti-Semitism. Jassi, who is also Jewish, agreed but was adamant, despite finding some of the film’s content “objectionable”.
“Within the company, we don’t tolerate hate, discrimination, or harassment, but we recognize that as a retailer of content to hundreds of millions of customers with diverse viewpoints, we must be willing to allow those viewpoints to enter. If you If you want to serve people, even if they differ from our personal point of view, it is unacceptable, – Jassi said.
A 2015 film based on the book of the same name promotes anti-Semitism and false claims, including that black Hebrew Israelites are the true descendants of the biblical Israelites.
It also claims that Jews are partly to blame for the global Jewish conspiracy to oppress black people and the African slave trade. Irving posted a link to the film on Twitter earlier this month and later refused to condemn the film when pressed by the media. He was eventually suspended for eight games by the Nets.
Sorkin asked if Amazon would consider putting a warning or warning label on the book or movie.
Jassi said that while Amazon has a panel of people who review each piece of content to assess whether something should be removed, it doesn’t have a process for warning labels. Adding this new layer is “difficult” because it’s “difficult to scale,” Jassi said.
“There are a lot of books and a lot of content where people want that disclaimer, and we don’t want a store that has a disclaimer on every page,” he said, noting that customers do a good job of providing warnings. he emphasized. their comments.
Amazon’s decision to continue selling the book and movie sparked controversy earlier this month Anti-Defamation League and Hollywood stars like Mila Kunis and Debra Messingwho want it removed from the site.
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