Earlier today the Amazon page for Spore, which is being flooded by people complaining about the games “draconian DRM,” had the customer reviews removed temporarily. They were eventually restored, but not before the internet had time to flip its collective shit. Upon returning, Amazon issued a short, but blunt reply:

You might have noticed that the customer reviews on the Spore details page were missing today. I wanted to let you know that we experienced a site glitch that resulted in the removal of the reviews. Amazon did not knowingly or consciously choose to remove the reviews. The team is working on resolving this issue now and restoring all the reviews on the site.

Per our policy, Amazon doesn't censor or edit customer reviews and we'd only remove a review if it fell outside our guidelines.

The journalist in me wants to join in the torch lighting, because it seems, at face value, to be unnecessary intervention. The rationalist in me sees that there’s absolutely no reason for Amazon to remove the comments, and not being among the higher trafficked game retailers, EA pressure wouldn’t really make them budge. If it was a Wikipedia issue maybe I'd see the argument, but the fact that the comments were restored before people even really had a chance to notice what happened makes me think it was, in fact, a poorly timed bug.

What do you think? Glitch, or attack on freedom of speech?

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