How Did Amazon End Up Selling T-Shirts With Ridiculously Offensive Slogans?

Blame it on automation run amok

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Amazon has taken some heat for offering T-shirts with extremely offensive, upsetting slogans—"Keep calm and rape a lot," "Keep calm and grope a lot," "Keep calm and knife her"—from a merchant called, appropriately enough, Solid Gold Bomb. The T-shirt maker apologized profusely and deleted the shirts, claiming the phrases were automatically generated by a computer script from thousands of dictionary words. It's tough to fathom how language referring to raping and groping could find its way via algorithm onto $20 T-shirts playing off England's "Keep calm and carry on" World War II mantra.

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