Shopify tells support staff to give ‘no comment’ on Kanye West Nazi T-shirt
Shopify tells support staff to give ‘no comment’ on Kanye West Nazi T-shirt - The Logic
Can’t get past paywall, sorry
I’d recommend you contact any companies you’ve made a purchase from that uses Shopify as their backend. Tell them seeing the shop logo at checkout makes you feel uncomfortable going forward with a purchase knowing that Shopify also sells Nazi goods.
wasn't shopify started by 2 Germans?
that's surprisingly spineless
Shopify is a Nazi company, or at least sympathetic to Nazis.
If it's true that they took the site down then i don't think so. They just don't want "official" statements on the subject coming from some minimum wage phone lackey.
As someone who was a minimum wage phone lackey for a good few years, i wouldn't have trusted me with this subject either
Shopify’s Acceptable Use Policy says users can’t do anything illegal where they conduct business, or promote or threaten violence. Previous versions of its policy banned “hateful content,” according to archives available on the Wayback Machine, but the clause appears to have been removed in July 2024, based on cached versions of the page reviewed by Bloomberg.
because they told their front line support to say "no comment" on matters unrelated to Shopify stores? it seems like they took the store down, which really has little to do with the influx of support tickets and calls they likely got. I worked support for years -- this is amazingly unsurprising and I think the correct move, if they did indeed take down the store that is.
e: spacing
You repeat yourself.
Fence sitting isn't a good look either
The whole store is down now: https://yeezy.com/
I was thinking the "no comment" policy could just have been them working though the process to shut down their participation. A more direct statement would have been preferable, but it doesn't surprise me that they would rather get their ducks in a row before making an official statement.
Yeah, generally you don't want the front-line staff talking to the public about things outside their job description, because they could easily say something inaccurate.
Any time I've worked at a company that's had a big news announcement, they always send an email out first/same time saying, if any media inquiries or outside questions come in, please direct them to XYZ department. And that goes to everyone, not just support staff. They know the media can try to find other random employees.
it's pretty standard stuff.
The only thing not standard, would be if they told the support staff this, and then went radio silence and did absolutely nothing about it.
Cowards.
The fact they are still Shopify employees at this point is comment enough.
They're customer support. They're not making decisions at the company, they're just trying to pay their bills.
Seems a little extreme to claim that it's unethical to work for a company because someone who uses their product did something unethical.
Guess we've extended "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" to "there is no ethics under capitalism" entirely.
You'd denigrate the forklift operator loading cargo onto a truck without first looking inside.
Except in this case everyone just got a good look at what's inside the container, and it's mostly Nazism.
Bruh jobs don't grow on trees and some people have others counting on them and can't be a martyr.
Not surprising. There's a part of the Shopify careers site that has a letter you have to acknowledge that says (paraphrased): Care more about the ability to sell than what people sell, and if feel you might disagree with what people sell then this isn't the workplace for you. They really drill that point home on the site and in interviews, not surprising their stance is 'no comment'.
(I didn't get the job)
The site is down now, but I'll point out that that policy probably gets used more for filtering out religious people who might take issue with selling queer, feminism, or even rock music related items.
Yeah.
I'm sure that shopify is a shitty company, but this doesn't strike me as any more shitty than any other retailer.
I mean, you can't have your staff telling people to reduce the amount of plastic they buy.
Hahahahahaha. Doesn't he realize that the original Nazis would have refused to call him a human? They'd call him ape just because he's black.
Anyways don't travel to Europe with that shirt. You'll get beaten or jailed the moment you step out of the plane.
Counterpoint: Do travel to Europe with that shirt, for the same reasons you said.
Do travel to Europe with that shirt
I feel nazis need to be proud of their hate, wear it and see its effects. And die that way so everyone knows why.
Give him a time machine and march into germany. Yo mr. Hitler, big fan here.
Give it a few years, they'll be breaking out the skull measuring tools to tell us why he's really a criminal.
Fascists always turn on the token minorities, I don't understand how these people don't see that they're just delaying the inevitable while trashing their rep for people who don't care about them.
Wait he bought a super bowl ad to sell Nazi merch?
Yeezy, the apparel brand of musician Kanye West, is using Shopify’s technology to sell the swastika T-shirt. The Ottawa-headquartered commerce firm has yet to say publicly whether it will intervene. West, also known as Ye, bought a Super Bowl ad to direct people to the website. The store currently displays a single product named “HH-01,” a white T-shirt with the black version of the swastika used by the Nazi Party.
A current Shopify employee told The Logic that another member of staff, who is Jewish, had said on the company’s internal Slack messaging service they were uncomfortable that West’s store had been allowed to remain online for such a long time. The post had a number of supportive emoji reactions underneath.
The Shopify employee, whom The Logic agreed not to name because they were not authorized to speak to the press, said they first saw an alert about West’s store on Shopify’s Slack messaging system at around 2 p.m. ET Monday. In a response to the alert, someone from Shopify’s incident response team said senior leadership was “on top of it.”
Around 30 minutes later, support staff tasked with speaking to Shopify’s merchant clients were told to give “no comment” if a merchant asked about West’s swastika T-shirt and to end the chat if they established the merchant didn’t have questions about their own store.
And a 30-second Superbowl ad costs $8 million.
The worst part is, now that America has really showed its true underbelly, he'll probably make all of that back plus a tidy profit.
I'm sure nazis can't wait to buy a shirt from a black guy
If it was my company and I had the accesses I think the database would be having a hard time right now, and so would the backups
I would be exporting records from the database to excel and keeping a record of all the people buying this shirt.
Data exfil is a lot easier to be prosecuted for than fucking up the backups or database, since you can reasonably make the argument that it was an accident.
Though, any company worth their salt has off-site/offline backups, so it will be rather hard to do any lasting damage in a plausibly deniable manner.
Here is a breakdown of shopify and their support for nazi merch!
Good to know, seems like Shopify has a history of supporting nazis
Siegify
Yeap, Tobias Lütke is our very own Canadian Muskrat... just as racist, just as stupid, just as full of himself
He knows there are plenty of racist that will buy his merch. Making money from them does not mean he has to like them. You know how capitalism works! Its all about the money!
A company that sells nazi merch is a nazi company.
Pretty sure Shopify took down the site.
Took a long fucking time to do that.
Pretty sure spotify said to not comment about them selling Nazi gear
Wonder if people should move to WooCommerce: https://opensourcealternative.to/project/woocommerce
DO NOT DO THIS TO YOURSELF
I mean the Wordpress founder alone should be enough. I work a lot w people migrating from Woocommerce and I have not been impressed. API routes that 500 randomly, horribly messy data, etc. That of course is my biased view based on a subset of Woo merchants. I invite anyone looking to migrate from Shopify to heavily weigh their options.