But it does violate their own practical policies:
> After the announcement, one woman said she listed two titles, “On Beyond Zebra!” and “McElligot’s Pool,” for sale on eBay on Wednesday. Later that day, she said, she received an email from eBay explaining that “On Beyond Zebra!” had been removed from sale because it violated eBay’s “offensive material policy.” The second title was pulled Thursday morning, she said.
As in, the usual über vague policies that give the interpreter of the rules carte blanche to deem whatever he will a violation of the “rules”, — the typical prætence of rule of law, for what is really rule of men.
> Will they apply the logic here to all categories of goods for sale? T-shirts? Political buttons? Historical political pamphlets? Current political pamphlets or campaign material? How about baseball team merchandise that has racist mascots? (Why haven’t they?) Merchandise of companies where the CEO may have bigoted views?
Logic? If ever there will be a consistent thought process, it will be based on analysing profits and on nothing more, not on the actual qualities of the work removed, and most often it is not even about profit, but about gut feeling and arbitrary bandwagons and standards of being offended.
> How about books that have words in them that discuss race, or in any way describe an unflattering picture of a certain group? Or scientific studies that may come to race-based findings?
If ever they become notorious enough that they end up on advertiser's networks blacklists, and thus hurt their profits, then yes.
Consider the situation with TVTropes that implemented it's “content policy” to ban certain content in 2012 for advertisement reasons. The policy itself speaks of content, but in implementation, only matter notorious enough to end up on advertiser's blacklists was removed. So Kodomono Zikan, a work infamous, but actually quite mild when one takes the time to read it, is banned from being mentioned there, but less infamous works such as Prisma Ilya which go far further in serializing minors can freely be featured there, as they never became popular enough to be featured on advertiser's blacklists.
If ever a company have any rational thought process, it shall be in the pursuit of profit; morality is never a rational objective.