Last night, the Rebeldes posted the following piece about CafePress' "Anti-Mexican Gifts" section.
Product from Cafepress "Anti-Mexican Gifts" Section
The piece generated some very quick social media buzz and reaction, and tonight the PR agency for CafePress sent us the following statement:
As you may know, CafePress is an automated e-commerce service that allows users to upload merchandise designs into online shops and/or the CafePress marketplace. The range of user-designed products varies widely in topic, taste and political opinion. CafePress’ independent design community spans the globe, with users representing multicultural and multinational ideals and sentiments. As such, users may upload designs that some find distasteful or offensive, but are nevertheless consistent with our policies for expressions and content on our website. At times, user-uploaded
designs are simply unacceptable based on our content usage policy and those images may be removed. We encourage our customers to notify us at cup@cafepress.com if they see user content on CafePress that they feel violate our policies. We review all requests for content review, measure user-uploaded images against our policies and determine a plan of action if any is appropriate.
We regret any problems or concerns caused by the images in question. Please note that the user-uploaded images in question do not reflect the opinions of CafePress and its employees.
We thanked them for the statement, but also took the opportunity to submit the following questions for clarification. As of this posting, CafePress has not responded, but if they do we will share.
- Do the current products listed on your "Anti-Mexican Gifts" section constitute a policy violation of your content policy?
- As for the Home Depot logo parodies, does this also fall under a policy violation?
- What about the Nazi symbol on the Arizona tee shirt that is listed on your site?
- Will you be revising or changing the title of the "Anti-Mexican Gifts" section? We ask because that head is not a user-generated section, but falls under your website.
The PR agency for CafePress responded to us at 7:15 PM EST and said the following about our questions: "Thank you for following up! This is our official statement."
In the meantime, there is now no Anti-Mexican Gifts section. The URL is now invalid.
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[…] asked for a comment, they responded first with what you’ll find here. Then they responded again with this: CafePress is in the process of reviewing user-designed images […]