Warning: this post contains explicit material and is not suitable for minors. Reader discretion is advised.
I was scrolling through Instagram not too long ago and saw a post from Collective Shout, an organization fighting sexual exploitation, calling out TeePublic. For what, you might ask? Selling baby onesies with shocking sexual content.
TeePublic replied to this with a standard corporate response, and removed a grand total of fifteen offending designs. Fifteen. With thousands of designs for onesies on their site, there are surely more than fifteen inappropriate ones scattered about.
So, how bad is it?
On the surface, TeePublic is your run of the mill shop for t-shirts, as well as hoodies, and other items such as pillows and stickers. People can upload designs to be sold on products, ranging from magnets to adult clothing to children’s apparel, including onesies (referred to on-site as “baby bodysuits”).
The onesies look tame at first glance, with sports, TV show references, and a QR code for “Never Gonna Give You Up” plastered on the fronts. Some of the designs are downright surreal, depicting a bloody handprint or a photograph of Don Rickles. There are also plenty of political slogans from both the left and right.
I sorted by the “funny” and “newest” parameters, and found the following.
The “I FUCK ON THE FIRST DATE” design in the upper right is not the same one which Collective Shout included in their first report just over a week ago.
7 inch (you know what I mean) has since been taken down, but an archive is available here.
I was on page 16 or 17 when I realized that there was a mature content toggle near the bottom of the page which my eyes had been skimming over. Everything listed above was found while the “mature content hidden” setting was enabled, though that’s not really relevant, as I’ll discuss further below.
I didn’t find anything akin to the BDSM designs which Collective Shout did during my search, but I think that I just wasn’t looking under the right tags.
These designs are extremely inappropriate for any sort of children’s clothing. How did they make it onto this apparel in the first place?
I made a burner account to find out and see what uploading a design was like. Upon uploading my design, I was prompted to answer “yes” or “no” to whether or not the design contained mature content. When I selected “yes”, I was not able to have my design sold on children’s items.
When I selected “no”, it was able to be sold on children’s apparel - though, I still had the option to toggle whether or not it could be sold on certain items.
Thus, in order for the inappropriate content shown above to be sold on onesies and such, the seller would have selected “no” when asked if the design contained mature content, and decided not to disable selling on children’s clothing. Why this is the case is beyond me - is it out of pure laziness? Do they want more people to see their designs?
I think that this highlights failures in TeePublic’s content moderation. Perhaps it’s a bit unrealistic to ask for them to verify whether designs are appropriate to be sold on certain products - they likely get hundreds to thousands of uploads per hour. But the sheer fact that designs clearly inappropriate for children are able to be sold on apparel for them, and then slip through the cracks for days, weeks, perhaps even longer, is astounding.
There is no option to file a report on a product page, or the design page accessible from a shop’s profile. There is a way to submit a report for concerning designs through their “Contact Us” page, but the link to it is at the bottom of the page, not readily visible like one would hope.
After you get to the Zendesk request page and select in the first dropdown that you have a question or concern about a design, you then must select from another dropdown menu that you’re offended by a design. After that, you have to select which option best fits the offensive nature. The only options are “hate speech”, “misinformation”, and “violent”. There are no options for “sexual”, “pornographic”, “obscene”, “should not be sold on children’s apparel”, or for anything else that may violate their terms of service.
Speaking of terms of service, TeePublic’s terms state that content uploaded to its site shall not be obscene, pornographic, or indecent, which many of the above designs, as well as the ones which Collective Shout found, certainly are.
the content does not contain material that defames or vilifies any person, people, races, religion or religious group and is not obscene, pornographic, indecent, harassing, threatening, harmful, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, abusive, inflammatory or otherwise objectionable
(Bolding is mine.)
So, let’s recap. Someone can upload a mature design while marking that it does not have mature content. That design can then be sold on children’s clothing if the seller wishes. These designs on children’s products can stay up for days or weeks with no way to report on-page. Once you do find the correct place to file a report, there is no option for inappropriate designs on children’s apparel, or obscene designs in general.
This needs to change. You can reach TeePublic at help@teepublic.com, and they have accounts on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit. They’re owned by Articore (which also owns Redbubble), which can be contacted at media@articore.com.