TeePublic responds - but we're not buying it!
*Content warning*
Last Friday we launched a new campaign against online apparel company TeePublic for selling harmful and degrading clothing, including onesies for infants, with slogans glorifying violence against women and exploitation of children. We found countless onesies depicting women being choked, bound, handcuffed, on a leash and chained up.
"Choke me - it's the only way I learn." On a baby onesie - and plenty more like it. @TeePublic is using babies as a vehicle for promoting the sexualised abuse of women. @Martin_Hosking any response?@collectiveshout https://t.co/48FqCHWgTB pic.twitter.com/VV0wWJv1Ok
— Caitlin Roper (@caitlin_roper) February 23, 2024
Supporters swiftly took to social media to call out TeePublic for turning a blind eye to the sexualisation of children and profiting off the degradation and abuse of women.
Over the weekend TeePublic wrote a comment on our Instagram post, but we're not buying it. 
“Thank you for bringing this very serious matter to our attention.”
So, prior to our campaign, TeePublic was not aware of the thousands of designs - including baby onesies - promoting sexualised violence against women and sexualising children - advertised and sold on its own platform? How did your multi-million dollar company miss the Hentai porn or the ‘I f*ck on the first date’ slogan on baby clothes or the ‘Daddy’s little slut’ messaging under a young girl’s face on a T-shirt? It only took our small team a few minutes to find countless products featuring pornified representations of women and babies.
“TeePublic is an online marketplace where third-party sellers upload tens of thousands of designs each day and offer printed products for sale from their shops. Our Terms and Conditions and Content Standards seek to balance artistic expression with content that is not allowed on our platform in any form, such as graphic sexual content and content that incites violence.”
It appears TeePublic is attempting to pass the buck for their Corporate Social Responsibility failure by deflecting responsibility to sellers and hiding behind their Terms and Conditions. But Terms and Conditions alone, without moderation and enforcement - are meaningless, resulting in a platform infested with thousands of degrading, pornographic and sexually violent designs. TeePublic needs to take responsibility for the designs they host - and profit from.
There is nothing ‘artistic’ about women being bound and gagged and strangled nor in promoting a paedophilic aesthetic.
“Furthermore, it is a violation of our policies for sellers to offer kids apparel depicting any mature content.”
It may be a violation of your policies but it doesn’t appear your company does much to stop it. We do not accept that ‘mature’ content should include violent representations of women being harmed, regardless of where it appears.
“We take this issue very seriously and have conducted a review. As a result, we have removed the identified products from our platform and penalized the uploader accounts for violation of our policies.”
We appreciate that TeePublic has removed the 15 designs we featured on our blog. But a thorough ‘review’ would have located 1000s of offending designs including porn and BDSM-themed baby onesies being sold on the platform. In light of the sheer volume of these designs, it feels somewhat tokenistic that only 15 have been removed. What kind of 'review’ was undertaken, and why didn’t it detect items our team found within minutes?
“All sellers are required to identify whether their designs are mature, which blocks mature content on kids apparel.”
We reiterate – the promotion and incitement of violence and abuse of women is not harmful simply because it appears on children’s clothing or because children might be exposed to it. It is harmful regardless. There should be no place for messages and imagery that condones, celebrates and incite violence against women anywhere.
“In addition, our team of content moderators actively searches for content that violates our policies, and we also welcome the assistance of all users, who are invited to alert us to any products that may require removal under our policies by providing a link to the content through our Contact Us page.”
How many ‘content moderators’ does your company have? And how ‘active’ are they? We question how TeePublic’s so-called moderators could fail to detect so much material that openly degrades women, sexualises children and normalises violence and abuse, when members of our small non-profit can. Our supporters are doing a better job at locating harmful products than TeePublic’s paid moderators working for a company with a multi-million-dollar turnover. Perhaps more of this money could be invested in keeping your platform safe rather than contributing to attitudes which fuel violence against real women and children. It’s time you put community wellbeing before your profit margins.
We call on TeePublic to do a thorough review of their entire website and remove all designs that turn violence against women and children into merely an adornment on the apparel it sells.
See also:
Teepublic flogs child abuse onesies and incites violence against women
Cafepress still selling vulgar, sexualised children's and baby clothes
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