Blame It on Big Data

Amazon.com can’t seem to stay out of trouble these days. First it hired a shadowy group accused of having neo-Nazi sympathies â€" not exactly the sort of people you want to be called out for using in Germany, no matter how much trouble you have keeping your warehouse workers in line. Now the giant retailer is under fire in Britain for selling T-shirts that say things like, “Keep Calm and Rape Me” and “Keep Calm and Hit Her a Lot.”

“First Amazon avoids paying U.K. tax. Now they’re making money from domestic violence,” the former Labour deputy leader, John Prescott, said on Twitter, accrding to The Independent newspaper.

The T-shirts, which sold for about $25, were produced by Solid Gold Bomb, an Australian start-up. In a lengthy and profuse apology on Solid Gold Bomb’s Web site, Michael Fowler, the founder, said it was all a case of Big Data run amok. “This was a computer error,” he wrote.

Solid Gold Bomb was apparently trying to generate parodies of the iconic expression “Stay Calm,” and many of them turned out to be offensive, although no one at the company noticed. “These items sat online and on nonindexed servers for the last year and myself and our company had no idea of the issue,” he said.

In other words, a T-shirt company did not know what its T-shirts said, even when it was selling them on the world’s largest virtual store. “Had these items ever sold, we would have imm! ediately pulled the series,” Mr. Fowler wrote.

Amazon removed the shirts from sale, declining to say much to the British media â€" no surprise there. But it sells so much from so many vendors that it generally relies on complaints to monitor its virtual racks rather than vetting each item.

All of this sounds like a parody of a 1960s sci-fi movie where the computers take over and they decide, based on bad data, that the world must end. Luckily, this time it was only T-shirts, not nuclear weapons.