But I quickly realized there was an entirely different information ecosystem that not only thought Ahmari was correct but was duplicating his result by highlighting all the other conservative books that were supposedly being shadowbanned by Amazon. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy had been disappeared. Chaos Monkeys, written by a tech entrepreneur recently fired by Apple for being too outré, was gone. Coming Apart, Charles Murray’s book, had been condemned to the memory hole. A few people tried to set the record straight—calmly explaining that the books’ Amazon pages were still reachable when googled, that the books were appearing as normal in the search results on Amazon’s international sites, and that the company, when asked, copped to having technical difficulties—but they were drowned out by the dudgeon. Outrage mounted as discoveries of new “banned” titles were retweeted. A few people, certain that they were observing a purge in real time, started putting together comprehensive indexes of prohibited books. Some authors may even have relished the attention brought by the controversy (who knows how many sales you can rake in from the claim that “Big Tech and Bezos are at war with my ideas”?)... But the funny thing is that the exact same conversation was simultaneously happening on the left. The anti-Israel blog Mondoweiss darkly mused that Palestinian voices were being silenced in an effort by Amazon to shore up the Zionist entity. They asked their readers to send more examples and, sure enough, more examples came.