As we celebrate the festive season and prepare to move into a New Year, and indeed a new decade, the holiday has been tainted by Amazon who have been caught selling Auschwitz themed Christmas ornaments on their site earlier in December. The products, including Christmas tree decorations, mousepads and bottle openers, all display scenes of Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration and death camp where over a million innocent people were killed during World War II. After the Auschwitz Memorial Museum tweeted their outrage at the company for selling the products,

The incident does highlight some of the deep, entrenched problems in our society

Amazon have since removed them from their site. However, the incident does highlight some of the deep, entrenched problems in our society, raising questions about how tight regulations need to be around products in a world where the lines between security, political correctness and privacy are becoming blurred.

After removing the products from sale, an Amazon spokesperson issued a statement, saying “All sellers must follow our selling guidelines and those who do not will be subject to action, including potential removal of their account.” This is all well and good, but how did these items get put up for sale in the first place? Despite Amazon insisting that they have policies in place to vet the thousands of products and sellers that appear on the site on a daily basis, this system seems to be failing on all accounts. Two independent, non-profit groups conducted an enquiry into Amazon following the incident, concluding that Amazon’s apparent policies are “weak and inadequately enforced” and that this failure is leaving room for hate groups to “generate revenue, propagate their ideas and grow their movements.”

Herein lies the problem. For a company like Amazon, who has more than two million individual sellers and businesses on their site, vetting and supervising the products and the sellers themselves is near on impossible. The sheer number of people using Amazon on a daily basis makes the company one of the most influential in the world, and possibly also one of the most uncontrollable. Social media and online platforms are becoming increasingly powerful, making Amazon and its owner, Jeff Bezos, a hidden figure in society that people look to, whether they realise it or not. Amazon may not be as obvious an influencer as some of our politicians, however it is becoming highlighted just how dangerous it can be if not properly regulated.

And this is the core of the problem. Whilst Amazon itself may not be anti-Semitic, some people who use the site very well could be.

Whilst Amazon itself may not be anti-Semitic, some people who use the site very well could be

The seller who advertised the Auschwitz products may well have used Amazon as a means to access a wider audience. Whether this incident is indicative of a rise in anti-Semitism in society is hard to say, however it certainly does show how hateful groups are finding new ways to get through to the public, exposing many of our vulnerable people to messages that are simply horrific.

Regulations around products, especially on multi-billion-pound companies like Amazon, clearly need to be tighter. However, this debate is a difficult one as it is unclear as to where to draw the line. An offensive product to one person may seem perfectly harmless to another, and so we delve into the depths of subjectivity and personal opinion – a place where a solution is rarely found.

In the case of the Amazon Auschwitz products, it is clear that they are upsetting and concerning for most people, but cases of offending products may not always be this straight forward. It is true that Amazon must do better to check their sellers and products in the future, meaning they must find a way to stop this situation from happening again. But as a society as a whole, we also must discover which lines to draw and where to draw them so, when someone crosses them, we are clearer on the consequences to follow.

Amazon will be under continued scrutiny, but for now we must look to the future and make certain that we are cutting off all ways for hate groups to spread their ideas.