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
One former Shopify employee told The Logic it was ‘heartbreaking to see your life’s work perverted by full-on friggin’ Nazis’
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
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.
Bruh jobs don't grow on trees and some people have others counting on them and can't be a martyr.
Shopify is a Nazi company, or at least sympathetic to Nazis.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
Yeap, Tobias Lütke is our very own Canadian Muskrat... just as racist, just as stupid, just as full of himself