Transparency Reporting WHEREAS: With nearly five billion monthly visits, Amazon.com is the world’s largest ecommerce platform. Its primacy allows it to facilitate — or impede — free expression and access to information for billions of people through products and services sold on the platform. However, Amazon’s transparency reporting regarding restricted products and usergenerated content on its platform falls far short of industry1 and international human rights standards.2 Amazon has reportedly removed products and content from the ecommerce platform following pressure from authoritarian regimes, without disclosing the removal. The New York Times said Amazon restricted search results for LGBTQ+related products in the United Arab Emirates after being threatened with penalties by that government.3 Reuters reported Amazon stopped allowing customer ratings and reviews in China as “part of a deeper, decade-long effort . . . to win favor in Beijing to protect and grow its business.”4 Amazon.com reports on certain content and product restrictions in its annual Brand Protection Report, which is limited to fraud and product quality concerns and does not offer detail on types, methods, or reasons for these restrictions.5 While the company discloses government requests for user information in its biannual Information Request Report, it does not publish quantitative disclosures related to government content removal requests. In 2022, Ranking Digital Rights called Amazon “by far the least transparent U.S.-based platform,” with disclosures on par with China’s notoriously opaque tech giants. Amazon discloses less than Chinese retailer Alibaba on user appeals regarding 1 https://santaclaraprinciples.org/ 2 https://www.bsr.org/reports/A_Human_Rights-Based_Approach_to_Content_Governance.pdf 3 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/business/amazon-lgbtq-uae-emirates.html 4 https://www.reuters.com/world/china/amazon-partnered-with-china-propaganda-arm-win-
beijings-favor-document-shows-2021-12-17/ 5 https://brandservices.amazon.com/progressreport