20 March 2013
AMAZON: The accidental offer for shirts promoting abuse, created by apparel company Solid Gold Bomb, has been sorted out and should not be held so strongly against Amazon.
By Isabel De La Garza, Senior Writer
Amazon was asked by several women’s rights and anti-abuse activists to make a “substantial donation” to a women’s refuge last week after T-shirts from the online apparel retailer Solid Gold Bomb, which displayed violent slogans such as “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot,” “Keep Calm and Hit Her” and “Keep Calm and Rape Them” appeared on its website. Amazon promptly deleted the pages after several complaints. However, the company has now been accused of being misogynistic and making money off of abuse.
The T-shirts were created by Solid Gold Bomb, a company founded in Melbourne, Australia by Michael Fowler, which mainly distributes its products through Amazon and actually uploaded the shirts for sale by mistake. Fowler had created a computer script which would use online and electronic dictionaries to generate parodies of the phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On,” a World War II British propaganda slogan which has since had a modern revival worldwide. As this script had access to any verb in the English language it could make shirts that said anything from “Keep Calm and Dream on” to “Keep Calm and Grope on.” All the shirts were supposedly kept on servers for later review but were uploaded to Amazon due to a “computer glitch.” Fowler states that he and his company “had no idea of the issue,” and are currently pulling the sale pages from their “own [site] and Amazon channels worldwide.”
Amazon has suspended Solid Gold Bomb’s accounts as well. Its only sales channel left is its own website, which has had its sales plummet from 300-1700 orders a day to three orders a day just three days after the scandal. Currently, none of the offensive shirts have been sold by the company and any orders for them have been denied. Fowler has apologized profusely over his website and may have to shut down his business due to ongoing boycotts. The problem has been more than adequately resolved.
Many, however, are still out for more recompense. Naturally, the sale of shirts with abusive phrases is not something that should be allowed, but in this case it resulted from a technical error. Such occurrences happen often over the Internet and even in advanced software and videogames thoroughly tested and thought-out by extremely knowledgeable technical engineers and computer scientists. It was indeed negligence on the part of Solid Gold Bomb to not regularly monitor the computer script’s generated slogans, and shortsighted to use electronic dictionaries to generate slogans in the first place. It was also negligent for the company to not monitor all the shirts it had for sale, especially since it wants to advertise them through a larger company.
Solid Gold Bomb was not the only irresponsible company, however. Amazon did not know that the shirts were even available on its website. Unlike Solid Gold Bomb though, Amazon has a much wider inventory of goods for sale, uploaded by many different vendors, which it may not be able to keep track of easily. Both companies do have a bit of a hand in the issue.
This does not mean that they both should be punished so drastically. The two companies have both worked hard to remove the items from the Internet and make them no longer for sale. Asking for a large donation to women’s organizations from Amazon is a bit of overkill. The shirts are gone, no one got hurt physically and the issue has been solved. Amazon itself never meant to offer the shirts in the first place and had no hand in uploading them. They were uploaded as a technical error. Of course Amazon should have workers monitoring the uploads in case of copyright issues or issues such as these, but it is very possible that the shirts had not been reviewed yet. Many groups are making too much of an issue out of this.