Amazon bought the James Bond franchise from MGM, and they are now bowdlerizing the Bond films by eliminating firearms from some images:
Amazon — which took creative control of the series earlier this year in a blockbuster deal with MGM — quietly removed all of the firearms from the thumbnails for all of the James Bond movies on its Prime Video streaming service.
The backlash was swift — and justified. Bond is a spy with a license to kill, so it’s silly to pretend he wouldn’t be carrying a gun. Scrubbing all of the weapons out of the Bond posters is like erasing the spacesuits from Apollo 13 or Photoshopping the axes out of firefighters’ hands in an image promoting Backdraft. Hell, there’s even a gun in the logo — that’s how emblematic weaponry is for the series. Some on social media called Amazon’s decision “cultural vandalism,” while others denounced the company for being too “woke.”
But the reality is apparently more interesting than a simple case of wokeness run amok:
Was this really an attempt to soften the spy’s image and cater to people who may be offended by him packing heat? We won’t know for sure, as Amazon has declined to comment on the decision, but it seems to be more of a financial decision than anything, an attempt to appease the almighty algorithm. Policies vary from platform to platform, but generally speaking, most social media algorithms and some search engines “punish” images that contain firearms, suppressing them or flagging them as “sensitive” content. YouTube de-monetizes any gun-related video on its platform. The decision to disarm Bond has nothing to do with how Amazon feels about the movies potentially promoting violence — it’s simply an SEO play.
So you can show a movie called The Man With the Golden Gun, but if you show the gun you will be demoted or demonetized on social media.
As noted above, the 007 logo for all of the Bond films includes a firearm:
One wonders how much of what we see on social media has been censored, in one way or another, to conform to faceless and unaccountable algorithms.
