What Amazon’s A+ System Taught Me About Censorship

I’m the editor, not the author, of Imprisoned as an Elder: My Journal to God During Covid. That honor belongs to Robert Clark. My job this week was simple: add A+ Content to the book’s Amazon listing so readers could see more about it. The book itself had already been published without issue. The eBook was live. The print edition was live. The title, the cover, and the content had all been approved months ago, so the problem didn’t start with publishing. It started with marketing.

When I tried to submit A+ Content, the system rejected it repeatedly. And the message was not vague. It explicitly said the word “Covid” violated community guidelines. Not a sentence. Not a claim. Not context. The word itself. I changed the description, rewrote the copy, altered image text, renamed files, and removed that word from every visible field. No go. Somehow, this word was still an issue. So I deleted modules, recreated them, and re-uploaded images. No matter what I did, the system still insisted the word “Covid” was the problem.

Then, I did something experimental. I opened the cover image and blurred the word “Covid” on the title. Nothing else changed. Same layout, same design, same book. I uploaded it again — and it went through instantly. The word ”Covid?” It is used throughout the book.

This detail matters because it proves something important: this wasn’t about content quality, accuracy, context, or safety. It was about category. A single politically charged word triggered rejection regardless of how it was used. That’s not neutral enforcement. It’s ideological filtering implemented through infrastructure. Whether the people writing the code meant it that way doesn’t change the outcome. The system did not evaluate what was being said. It only evaluated what subject appeared.

Robert Clark’s book is not misinformation or propaganda. He wasn’t trying to persuade or instruct, nor was it editorial commentary. Robert Clark was simply a man writing to God from inside prison during a volatile chapter of recent history. Nothing in the book told anyone what to believe, what to do, or how to think. And yet, the word itself was unacceptable. So we erased it — literally blurred it out of existence — in order to get past an automated gatekeeper.

Some people will say “It’s a private company, they can do what they want.” That’s technically true. It’s also irrelevant. When one company controls publishing, sales, marketing visibility, and discovery, its policies no longer operate in a vacuum. They shape culture and determine what survives economically. They train publishers and authors on what to avoid, and turn compliance into habit without ever announcing rules.

Freedom of speech does not exist to protect polite, popular language. It exists to protect uncomfortable speech, inconvenient speech, and ordinary speech that brushes up against power structures simply by existing. In this case, the speech wasn’t even controversial. It was devotional. Yet it still had to be altered to live inside the system.

This is what censorship looks like now. Not dramatic bans. Not bonfires. Not blacklists carved in stone. It happens quietly, through automation and silent refusals. Through invisible rules applied without explanation. Through software that doesn’t understand meaning but still reshapes language anyway.

The most unsettling part is that this isn’t an isolated case. It’s how easy it was to make it disappear. And for those who have a hand in this silencing? Shame on you.