AN AMERICAN CLOTHING company has blamed a rogue, automated computer script for a series of t-shirts, which had been for sale on Amazon’s UK website, which glorified sexual assaults.
‘Solid Gold Bomb’, based in Massachusetts, said the t-shirts – carrying the slogan, ‘Keep calm and rape a lot’ – had been automatically generated “using a scripted computer process” which generated t-shirt slogans based on formulaic dictionary words.
The shirts, which appeared for sale on Amazon yesterday, prompted a massive online furore – with thousands of users making complaints to Amazon’s twitter account demanding its removal.
The range of shirts was removed – but another batch, with the substitute phrase ‘Keep calm and hit her’ (seen below), soon appeared afterwards.
This morning Amazon permanently deleted the range from its online store.
The company’s Facebook and Twitter profiles have both been closed, while a statement apologising for the range was posted to its website’s ‘Contact Us’ page.
“Although we did not in any way deliberately create the offensive t-shirts in question and it was the result of a scripted programming process that was compiled by only one member of our staff, we accept the responsibility of the error and our doing our best to correct the issues at hand,” the page said.
The company added that it was “doing its best” to fix the problem.
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