by Alex Lasker
A clothing company has apologized after a racist, user-created T-shirt slipped through a filtration system and ended up for sale on its website.
Teespring, a custom design company which allows users to create and sell products like T-shirts and mugs, has sold more than $300 million in products since it was founded by two college seniors six years ago.
The San Francisco-based company said it has a system that can tag and remove racist and offensive content from its website, but due to a combination of coding issues and human error, a T-shirt reading “Black Women Are Trash” went on sale over the weekend.
The offensive design, reportedly created by Twitter user @TrueCharter, was made in response to another T-shirt that read “Men Are Trash.”
After receiving major backlash on social media over the shirts, Teespring removed the design and apologized, saying although it uses a combination of automated and human review to monitor content, both means unfortunately failed to prevent the racist campaign.
“Once we learned of the error we immediately took steps to remove all content in question and ban the offending seller from our platform. We have since fixed the issue,” Brett Miller, director of seller success at Teespring, told USA TODAY.
Be the first to comment