Amazon needs to act now to stop hate speech

Hate speech should have no place in our society, and especially online. With social media platforms, their membership and audience growing exponentially, the monitoring of hate speech and cyber bullying has fallen behind. Onenewsoutletrevealedhow hats which read ‘black lives don’t matter’ were being sold on Amazon. The conglomerate firm apologised and claimed the hats were being sold by a third party.

In this day and age, that is no excuse for allowing hate speech to be projected from their website.

Closer to home, the Portsmouth Down Syndrome Association (PDSA) has joined the #NoPlaceForHate campaign which is urging the same company, Amazon, to do more to prevent T-shirts promoting Down Syndrome hate speech.

As one of the biggest websites in the world which many people use on a regular basis, it is extremely damaging for them to allow this type of bullying to occur.

PDSA chair, Rachael Ross, whose son Max has Down Syndrome, told ‘The T-shirts are extremely offensive and say things like “let’s make Down Syndrome extinct”.

‘The slogans are damaging and offensive to families and people with Down Syndrome because that would mean they aren’t here which is a very upsetting thing to say and have on a T-shirt.’

However this is not the first time such T-shirts have been sold on the website and they were found as early as March this year.

An online petition has collected 60,000 signatures calling on Amazon to put an end to the items once and for all.

But it should not take a petition to remove such items, it should be common sense and decency.

If they Amazon continue to fail to monitor what sellers are putting up and promoting on their website, they are treading a dangerous path.