Lets unravel this.

Firstly, the automation, which is what your response is about, and which is a red herring. Although the creation of the offending items was largely automated, what went in had to be put there (and I saw the site as it was – it was all carefully categorised, so someone, somewhere, has, at some level organised the data. In that data was the term ‘rape someone’.

So automation, which I accept happens, and has to some extent somewhere in this story, does not let people off the hook. It was ill advised at best, cheap publicity and link seeking at worst.

I was hugely upset by it, having lived through the fallout of rape at knifepoint. I didn’t mention Pete in my article, he’s obviously hot under the collar about it. I wish he was directing his anger at the people who let this out there, and engaging in a sensible conversation, rather than ranting at people who’ve had all kinds of nasty experiences relived thanks to this judgement in error.

I’d like us to get back to the issue this story sought to raise, which is that using shock tactics for the generation of links and/or publicity has to be unacceptable – the price paid by others is too high. And if this company were advised by a third party, they were ill advised: I don’t think they’ve had an easy time of it. I believe they’ve even received death threats. How awful is that?

Ethics are a really, really important part of communications, so I don’t find it egregious to be saying that this T-shirt should never have been out there, and automation is no excuse at all.

What I have massive trouble with here is your assertion that “someone, somewhere, thought that a great way to earn some links” which is patently ridiculous. This is the worst sort of publicity. It’s not “50 shades of negative,” as you assert.

My real issue is that you’re equating being a “rape apologist” with explaining how the internet works. Rape is terrible, inexcusable, and can never be apologised for.

But the fact that it’s so terrible doesn’t excuse us from rationality when discussing it. Pete Ashton has NEVER been a rape apologist – he states very clearly that the t-shirts “are inexcusable” but he wants to explain how they came to be.

And he is right: they were auto-generated. Not just by SGB: Amazon (I hope you would agree) would also NEVER want to sell something like this (in fact, their rules explicitly prohibit this). But they “approved” it as well. Why would a publicly traded company ever endorse rape? They wouldn’t (not should they). So why do you think Amazon approved this? And if they didn’t, why is it possible that they didn’t but somehow SGB did?

The only way we’re ever going to truly end rape is if we learn to – as hard as this is – have rational discussions. You haven’t added anything to that rationality: you’ve actually taken away from it, and levelled a terrible accusation at someone who is anything but, as far as I can tell, a rape apologist. For someone who works in communications, I find this to be quite egregious.

I wouldn’t normally allow a comment through that called other people names, but I hope you won’t mind me using this as a chance to say that I don’t think they’re “dicks” for not agreeing with me – I always feel that the onus is on me to make myself clear, and if they’ve thought I was asking for the articles to be taken down because of the automation issue, I obviously wasn’t clear enough. I’ll do better next time.

It was absolutely lovely of you to express support – I felt very strongly on this issue, and wish people would just take their responsibilities as seriously as their money making!

In addition for the supporters of automatic creation out there – in the long run it is clearly a stupid idea and frankly Amazon should be being asked what they are doing to stop the automation of shops like this.

I saw nothing in the article by Pete (or his extremely vulgar and nasty response on Twitter) or when I looked at the site that suggests the article was actually automated, but, as I’ve noted, it may well have been tidied up by the time I looked. I hadn’t seen or heard any convincingly clear explanation regarding the supposed automation as yet – just a couple of hypotheticals which ran contra to my own experience of categorising things into shops on Amazon.

Moreover, even if you’re playing the kind of word shuffle through an automated system as suggested, the word rape was in there in the first place. (And having just looked up the latest apology, it is actually the case that the word was left in – so the consequences were utterly predictable.)

Automating it, without a care as to the consequences, and not being bothered to check what appears, is worse. It implies that this was merely fishing for reactions and the fact that the image was publicised throughout the nationals further suggests to me that there was some publicity/link seeking at hand. Of course I don’t know, and neither, unless there’s something you’ve not stated here, do you. We only have the word of a director who was careless of what hurt might be caused by what was published.

The automation’excuse’ is irrelevant: those who are using it to excuse them are inadvertently becoming apologists for incitement to rape. And before you yell “it’s just an image” it’s not. I spent a long time researching this for an article when I was a journalist: making sexual violence ‘funny’ normalises it, justifies it in the mind of people who would otherwise have barriers. People who start with silly verbal banter go on to ‘silly’ exposure, go on to assault….

The point I have evidently failed to make is that rape is painful, both for its victims and those around them, and using it like this – for cheap profit/publicity – is unacceptable both for it’s ‘normalisation’ of something unacceptable, and for it’s consequences. (It could be you, your family, your friends, next.)

As it happens, I appear to be in a minority who care about it, and Interflora’s back in its place, so I’ve let this lie rather than stirring anything further. It is entirely up to you whether you do the same: unlike your buddy Pete, I’m happy to engage with/tolerate people who want to comment on something I’ve written. I put it here in the first place to inspire debate, and if it does that, it can’t be a bad thing – even if it was written in a somewhat emotive moment! As long as people are tackling the content/ideas rather than being personally abusive, I’m happy to publish their comments.

Incidentally, I did look at the solid Gold Bomb site at the weekend and saw that all of the directors details had been removed and that they had been sent death threats. I do not condone or support this. As noted above, I do think it was utterly predictable to anyone whose been in a PR role for any length of time. There are a lot of nutters out there, and if you encourage people to play with fire, fingers get burned. Those who use negative PR need to understand what they are playing with.

The apology that’s there now isn’t the one that was there at the weekend, and as Amazon has removed the site, I think justice has, to some extent been done. But not without opening a lot of wounds for a lot of rape victims, which is the tragic consequence of this carelessness, and what I had hoped to point out in what I wrote originally.

(I would go and add an addendum to Pete’s website – but he’s blocked me and closed off comments. The addendum would say that the word ‘rape’ was included in the algorithm, so automation is no excuse.)

I think the more important issue is that just because you don’t have a manual input you don’t have to be held to account for what you’ve published.

But thank you for bothering to let me know about the automation. I hadn’t blogged for a while (really bad, given my profession, but client work always takes priority!) It’s nice when people take the time.

There’s nothing here that couldn’t be automated. The texts are likely to have been generated by an algorithm (you could of course argue that the set of words was chosen by a human, but I disagree – I mean, thinking from an efficiency standpoint, why bother?).

The images of the t-shirts are generated by placing the texts on top of a picture of t-shirt because no one would want to do that for hundreds of thousands of times by hand. The products are added to Amazon and priced automatically – there’s software that makes up the “right” price. And as stated elsewhere, these shirts don’t actually exist before someone orders one – it’s actually the same thing with some rarer books.

I haven’t followed the issue enough to comment on the PR side of it, or responses from the parties. Just wanted to point out that even if it seems odd or a technically hard thing to do, doesn’t mean that these products couldn’t be generated by a computer. See for example this story, where a programmer wrote 800,000 books to sell them on Amazon: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143382-programmer-creates-800000-books-algorithmically-starts-selling-them-on-amazon (Of course none of these exist either, and they are only printed should someone buy them.)

I am perhaps a little too close to the subject matter, and rape is an emotive issue, but the fact that the very nastiest of 778,436 listings were taken and propelled says to me that there’s some kind of marketing happening with no care for the sensitivities of those whose suffering is very real.

I’m not calling for censorship – I’m sure that there are niches of people who find it funny. But it is a select niche of people who find violence against women (or other groups) amusing. This content merits categorising as adult. If Interflora can have its search results censored by Google because it’s paid for advertising somewhere, surely to goodness a bunch of profit seeking T-shirt makers printing broadly offensive statements without any manual check on what’s there deserve to be treated as adult content? Perhaps more so because of the irresponsibility of using a machine with no care for the consequences? Words are emotive. They cause wars, rifts, heroes, failures. I don’t want my kids exposed to that as ‘normal’.

Thanks for coming back on the automation issue though, and caring enough to respond – happy to eat humble pie on that front