Thread by @Hebro_Steele

A month has passed since I posted the below thread on Amazon' @PrimeVideo's removal of nearly 1,500 customer reviews for my documentary, "What Killed Michael Brown?" For months, I've resisted the temptation to label this as deliberate censorship, preferring to withhold judgment since the disappearing act began in June. But now, I must conclude that this quiet erasure constitutes a form of cancellation by omission. 🧵

In the month since my last post on this issue, I've made repeated attempts to engage the company's support team in the hopes of restoring those reviews. Those efforts have been met with silence— what accountability does Amazon hold to an independent filmmaker?

Amazon's sole explanation in July, delivered by an employee who candidly confessed her lack of expertise in such matters, pinned the blame on a vague "merger." Her words were as follows:

Yet if this merger truly obliterated the reviews, why did 17 linger untouched, spanning from 2021 to 2025? Wouldn't a systemic wipeout have claimed them all? My response:

Yet, after exhaustive research—including AI-assisted searches across public records, forums, and reports—no comparable instances emerged for other films on Prime Video. Mergers have occasionally affected product reviews on Amazon's e-commerce platform, such as when variant listings for books or goods are combined, sometimes leading to review relocation or deletion. However, this pattern does not appear to extend to streaming content, where review integrity is preserved to foster user trust and platform transparency. (Amazon goes to great lengths to punish review farming.) The anomaly here is glaring, suggesting not a glitch but a choice.

After three months of navigating this stalemate, two explanations emerge as the most credible. The first deals with the stark, elitist class divide in Hollywood: had this situation happened to a filmmaker with establishment clout— Michael Moore, Davis Guggenheim or Adam Sandler—the reviews would likely have been reinstated in a swift matter, focused solely on upholding the page’s integrity. If that's the case, what leverage do independent creators possess against a behemoth like Amazon, whose cultural gatekeeping rivals that of any state apparatus? Are we outsiders to be left at the mercy of a system rigged for the insiders with either money or the right kind of political clout? What does that mean for our common culture?

The second, more insidious possibility points to ideological discrimination, echoing Amazon's 2020 decision to initially ban the film outright, deeming the insights of my father, Shelby Steele, incompatible with the "approved" racial narratives amplified during that hysterical, panicked summer of George Floyd. Our voices, grounded in a classical liberal critique of identity politics, were evidently not the "right kind" for Amazon to promote during the outcry for black perspectives that aligned with progressive orthodoxy.

And now, five years on, the near-total purge of our reviews has stripped the documentary of its hard-earned legitimacy. Compounding the injury, Amazon's algorithm demotes the film in visibility rankings due to its depleted review count. By chance, I received this comment last night from a reader that illustrates this fear:

Confronted with this dead end, I've turned to legal avenues in a bid for accountability and restoration. My consultations with over five attorneys have revealed a near impossible landscape. Amazon's terms of service afford them sweeping authority over content and reviews. Precedents for content-bias litigation are scarce. Framing this as a breach of contract or unfair business practices holds some promise, yet political viewpoints enjoy no federal protections akin to those for race or gender. The financial cost is equally daunting—Amazon's resources dwarfs those of any indie filmmaker. Still, I have not given up and will continue to seek ways to challenge Amazon.

What, then, is the cost to our culture for losing What Killed Michael Brown? to obscurity? We crafted this film to pierce the falsehoods that enveloped Ferguson in 2014, to reclaim truth from ideological lies. As Americans, my father and I waded into that politically charged firestorm, not out of partisan zeal, but from a profound concern: what fate awaits society when lies are left unchallenged? Now, as we approach the final edits on our forthcoming documentary, White Guilt—a work poised to provoke even fiercer backlash—what fate awaits it? Will it too be quietly neutered?

In an era where Big Tech wields unchecked power over discourse, the erosion of dissenting voices isn't merely a personal affront. It is a harbinger of intellectual monoculture, where inconvenient truths are algorithmically entombed. The battle for free thought demands vigilance against a cancel culture that seeks to re-write society’s moral code to its own liking.