Teespring blames code, human error for racist T-shirts
Website offered up shirts that said ‘Black Women Are Trash’
A custom T-shirt design company backed by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names apologized Tuesday for allowing a customer to create and then share products with racist phrases, products it said both its automated and staff monitors failed to catch.
Teespring, which has sold more than $300 million in merchandise since its founding by two college seniors six years ago, allows users to design T-shirts and other merchandise, such as mugs, and have them made and shipped via the site. Its customers typically promote their products over social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.
That’s where users started to notice — and express outrage — over a campaign selling T-shirts that said “Black Women Are Trash.” Other T-shirts contained other slurs against African Americans, according to links shared by Facebook users.
New code pushed out by Teespring ’s engineering team over the weekend tagged the slogans as offensive but failed to remove them from the store as the company’s policies dictated, the company said in a statement to USA TODAY on Tuesday.
“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.
“I guess my question really is, how did these shirts get past the screening process?” wrote one user on Teespring ’s Facebook page. “Anything to make a dollar? While I see an apology, I do not feel as though it was sincere. Had those of us not pointed it out over the weekend, this campaign would still be going on. What will you do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”
The company says it has acceptable use policy that bars racist and other offensive content, and monitors for such content using a combination of automation and human review — both of which failed to prevent the campaign.
The San Francisco-based company graduated from the influential start-up incubator Y
not legally obligated to launch investigations.
Icahn did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. The White House said there had been no change in Icahn’s previously announced informal role as “a private citizen whose opinion the president respects and whom the president speaks with from time to time.”
“Mr. Icahn does not have a position with the administration nor a policymaking role,” the White House statement added.
The investigation request focuses on Icahn’s actions starting last year, when he made a large financial bet that the price of the renewable fuel credits would drop. Icahn “recommended personnel and policies that did, in fact, cause the price of these credits to drop,” the letter said.
“The net result was an ‘impossible’ ‘rare profit’ on the credits, ‘a $50 million turnaround’ from Mr. Icahn’s initial investment,” the letter added, citing a May 1 Reuters report.
That report and the senators’ letter cited several events it said drove down the price of the fuel credits, to the benefit of Icahn and CVR Energy. The prices fell as Icahn reportedly advised Trump to name Scott Pruitt as the EPA’s new administrator. They fell again, dropping roughly 20% after Trump nominated Pruitt in December.
Media reports in late February that Icahn had given the White House language to modify the fuel credit program sparked another drop, the senators’ letter said. This time the credits reached a 17-month low, representing a roughly 70% decline from a November 2016 peak.
“While this was occurring, most refiners were accumulating credits to satisfy renewable fuel standards,” the senators wrote. However, CVR was bucking the trend by short-selling or “offloading credits they would need to purchase again later in 2017 in a bet that the price for RINs would continue to plummet” and they could be repurchased later “at a discount.”
“Mr. Icahn does not have a position with the administration nor a policymaking role.” White House statement