cafepress

Daily Kos Founder @Markos Addresses @CafePress “SPICS” Ads: Advertiser Will Be Blocked

March 9, 2012 by Julito Leave a Comment

UPDATE: @Markos answered our questions aorund 3pm EST on Friday March 9.

Around noon today, @Markos, the founder of DailyKos, commented on our on post about a racist "SPICS" Ad from CafePress, which had cycled into their Google ad stream last night on the Kos site. According to its founder, Markos said that Daily Kos is taking steps to block the advertiser.

We did ask to see if Daily Kos would comment on the other questions we sent to them last night, and if they do, we will share those as well.

UPDATE, 1:30 pm EST: @Markos elaborated some more.

Filed Under: Immigration, Injustice, News, Politics Tagged With: @markos, cafepress, Daily Kos, Daily Kos CafePress ad, Daily Kos racist ads, The Daily Kos

#NoMames ALERT: Now @dailykos Displays @CafePress “Anti-Mexican” and “Spic” Ads on Daily Kos Site

March 8, 2012 by Julito Leave a Comment

UPDATE, 8:33 EST: We checked one more time to test if indeed the CafePress ad was taken down. It wasn't. Did we clean our cache? Yes. Did we check from two computers? Yes and yes.

Here is the pic we took at 8:33 EST

And here is the screen capture of the file name of the pic and when we saved it:

ORIGINAL POST

This all started out innocently enough. Someone in our community sent us a Daily Kos Ron Paul link that we clicked on because the headline was funny: Ron Paul campaign frustrated that they suck. We chuckled at the headline, then read the piece and yawned. We were about to move to another page when we say this in the right corner of the post:

We clicked on the ad and BOOM, all the fun CafePress products that we had blogged about were still there. But this time WE GOT A COUPON!!!!

So to the Daily Kos, we say #NoMames. Maybe you want to actually LOOK at your ads before you have them populate your site and practice what you preach? Let us know when the ad is down and also let us know why you did it in the first place? Thanks for promoting racism!

Just minutes after we tweeted this post out, we went back to the Kos link and got this:

Guess they are trying to fix their racist error. While we waited, we tweeted out to them for why the original CafePress products got listed in the first place.

Five minutes later, after getting the page error, we went back to the post. Looks like another ad had cycled in and the CafePress ad was not appearing any more:

Still, we ask this very simple question: why were they advertising the CafePress products in the first place? So much for being a "progressive" page.

No wonder we don't have ads on our pages.

And the irony of all this? DailyKos founder is half-Latino.

By the way, the chatter on Twitter has been interesting and one profile is suggesting that WE are the ones that are getting the ad because we visited CafePress a lot for our stories and our "cookies" are enabled to activate this product. Our questions then: Doesn't Daily Kos approve its ad content? Don't they get into agreements with ad companies that sell these types of banners? Ads like that don't magically appear on any website, if that is the case, we would be getting ads like that on other sites we visit, but we aren't

Questions linger about this. We hope Kos contacts us.

Filed Under: Immigration, Politics Tagged With: #NoMames, Cafe Press Latinos, cafepress, cafepress anti-mexican store, CafePress Mexican controversy, cafepress racist tees, Daily Kos, Daliy Kos Cafepress

Dear @CafePress: Submitting More Violations for You From Your “F*CK ILLEGALS” Section

February 29, 2012 by Julito 1 Comment

UPDATE: Around 7pm EST, the "F*ck Illegals" section has been taken down.

Looks like CafePress needs more employees or better servers, because they truly have some very suspect filtering systems. Our staff spent a little more time on the site today to see what other products they are selling, and after a reader suggested we enter the search term "F*ck Illegals," we came across these lovely gift ideas:

We think these are all policy violations from your site. Maybe it's time to rethink it all? Get better systems? Or hire more people to mine your images? Here's a thought: maybe eliminiate the word "f*ck" from your searches?

In the meantime, CafePress' PR Agency has revised its original statement statement to us. This is what we got at 5:20 EST today:

CafePress is in the process of reviewing user-designed images as brought to our attention recently. We are making decisions as to what user images are, and are not acceptable based on our policy.
We review over 120,000 user-uploaded images each week, and encourage our customers to notify us at [email protected] if they see user content on CafePress that they feel violate our policies.

UPDATE: The Anti=Mexico section has been taken down.

UPDATE: Around 7pm EST, the "F*ck Illegals" section has been taken down.

Filed Under: Immigration, Injustice, News Tagged With: cafepress, Cafepress anti-meixcan store, cafepress racist tees, Donald Trump racist Jon Stewart, f*ck illegals, fuck illegals

Even Though @CafePress Takes Down “Anti-Mexican Gifts” Section, “Anti=Mexico Gifts” Still Up

February 28, 2012 by Julito 2 Comments

Around 7pm EST today, we reported that CafePress issued a statement about the article we wrote about its "Anti-Mexican Gifts" section, and when an astute reader check the page, the "Anti-Mexican Gifts" section was taken down. Nonetheless, another reader alerted us that CafePress still has an "Anti=Mexico Gifts" section, and that section is still up as of 9:15 PM EST tonight. Here are the screen shots of some of the products:

Besides these lovely stickers, you can get your own Secure the Border hoodie:

Here is the main page:

Like we said in our original post, anyone in the world can create their own product and market it. If you want to post it on a Minuteman site, go crazy. But when one of the Internet's most popular customized sites allows for these products, it might be time to have actual human employess check contect or have better filters.

UPDATE, 5;55 PM EST: The ANTI=MEXICO site was taken down.

Filed Under: Immigration, Injustice, News, Politics Tagged With: anti-mexican gifts, anti-Mexico, cafepress, Cafepress anti-meixcan store, CafePress Mexican controversy, CafePress Mexico

CafePress Responds to Rebeldes Story About “Anti-Mexican Gifts” Section

February 28, 2012 by Julito 2 Comments

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 [email protected] 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.

Filed Under: Immigration, Injustice, News Tagged With: anti-mexican gifts, Cafe Press Latinos, cafepress, Cafepress anti-meixcan store, cafepress anti-mexican store, cafepress racist tees

#NoMames: Let’s All Go Shopping for “Anti-Mexican Gifts” at @CafePress

February 27, 2012 by Rebeldes 3 Comments

UPDATE: CafePress has eliminated this page section from their site.

Cafepress.com is one of the world's "customized" online shopping destinations. The idea is a simple one: create your own designs, upload them, make them into t-shirts, cups, bumper stickers, etc., and sell away. According to its site, "CafePress.com today ships over 6 million products annually, and has over 11 million unique visitors to our website each month."

Spend some time browsing the products on the site, and you might agree with what the company's co-founder so proudly states on its site:

Well, unless you get to the "Anti-Mexican Gifts" section. Looking for the right funny gift to express your hate and racism towards Mexicans? Well, Cafepress has got the goods for you. (We were alerted of this site by TextMex and were happy to see that our friends at ReMezcla posted about it as well.)

Hey, are you looking for a Home Depot ripoff logo to express your true inner feelings about mojados? Cafepress has got the goods for you.

And while you are at it, why not get that "cute Anti-Mexican shirt" for your the little Minuteman in your life?

As you explore the site, you would think that CafePress would actually HAVE a policy about this type of content, and they do. Here it is:

General Guidelines for Prohibited Content
Content that may infringe on the rights of a third a party.
Items that make inappropriate use of Nazi symbols and glamorize the actions of Hitler.
Use of marks that signify hate towards another group of people.
Hate and/or racist terms.
Inappropriate content or nudity that is not artistic in nature.
Content that exploits images or the likeness of minors.
Obscene and vulgar comments and offensive remarks that harass, threaten, defame or abuse others such as F*** (Ethnic Group).
Content that depicts violence, is obscene, abusive, fraudulent or threatening such as an image of a murder victim, morgue shots, promotion of suicide, etc.
Content that glamorizes the use of "hard core" illegal substance and drugs such as a person injecting a vial of a substance in their body.
Material that is generally offensive or in bad taste, as determined by CafePress.

So what do you think, do these and other products from the "Ant-Mexican Gifts" section violate CafePress policy? Also, is the actual section head a CafePress headline or was that created by someone else? By the way, it is pretty obvious that CafePress does very little to block products such as those above and shirts like these:

Granted, people can sell anything they want (CraigsList or your own damn webpage), but we think there is something wrong when a private company that claims it is policing its content is actually not. Anti-Mexican Gifts aren't cool and neither are images that pay homage to Nazi symbols. You can just do a Looney Tunes tee of Arpaio and Brewer for the same effect.

So Cafepress, we give you a #NoMames award.