Some TikTok users have reported seeing a troubling product in the last few days: T-shirts for sale on TikTok Shop that are an antisemitic parody of the Jaws movie poster. In the image printed on the shirts, the shark has been transformed into a human nose, the swimmer at the surface of the water is instead a $100 bill, and “Jaws” has been edited to read “Jews,” propagating antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish people as money hungry.
The Verge found multiple listings on TikTok Shop for the shirt from a handful of storefronts, some based in the US and others based in China. Prices range between $8.99 and $15, and other than the offensive design, the listings are just like any other drop-shipped graphic T-shirt: “This soft and comfy 100% cotton tee is your new everyday essential,” one listing reads. They make no mention of the hateful rhetoric emblazoned on the product; on the infinite scroll of contemporary online shopping, it is simply “Jews Funny Shirt, Cool Meme Graphic Shirt, Jaws Parody Humorous Tee.” In an email, TikTok spokesperson Ben Rathe said that the company removed the listings flagged by The Verge and would continue to take action against sellers who violate its policies around hate speech.
Though there is no shortage of offensive content on the internet, the antisemitic Jaws shirts exemplify part of what makes online shopping so strange in an era when recommendation algorithms and ultra-fast production cycles have collided.
For one, the shirts exist in a sort of liminal space: it’s a digital rendering of a garment, likely produced via a print-on-demand service that only creates the item once an order has been placed. In other words, you’re buying a product that doesn’t yet exist (and it’s not clear if anyone has even purchased the shirt at all). The TikTok Shop storefronts reviewed by The Verge exclusively peddle this kind of product: dozens or hundreds of solid color short sleeve T-shirts with designs that look like they were scraped off Instagram or Google Images. In the storefront that sold the Jaws shirt, the selection of products is random (“Meow’s it going?” with an image of a cat) and ideologically incongruous (“Immigrants are not criminals, but the president is”). Though it’s not clear where the Jaws edit originated from, the breadth and scale of these T-shirt businesses suggest that many of these storefronts are not operating solely to sell antisemitic garbage. They will sell anything, because print-on-demand and drop-shipping negates the need for inventory. These sellers will list as many designs and products as possible, a strategy not too different from the long-tail incentives of spam or phishing. It’s the same system that makes Etsy stores with cutesy products promoting liberal causes suddenly churn out items with pro-Trump messages. The bottomless potential of e-commerce means you lose nothing by flooding the zone.
It’s just one of a thousand digital listings with zero inventory meant to fill a spot in a feed
The other thing about the Jaws shirts is the role that the platforms play in hosting, elevating, or burying products. It’s hard to find the shirt on TikTok: a search on TikTok Shop for “Jews,” for example, returns nothing because the company has disabled the search term. (Meanwhile, a search for “Jew” pulls up listings for jewelry.) Users reported encountering the shirt while scrolling through their For You page, which, in recent years, has included more and more TikTok Shop content. The offensive products are both promoted and suppressed — they are for sale on the platform yet impossible to find, only popping up for some users when their algorithms deem them a target audience. How many people actually went ahead and ordered the Jaws shirt is another thing, and it likely doesn’t matter even to the entity selling it; it’s just one of a thousand digital listings with zero inventory meant to fill a spot in a feed.
The same or similar shirts can be found on other platforms like Amazon and Shopify, and the Anti-Defamation League called out Shopify last week for hosting storefronts selling the item. Amazon declined to comment, but the listing for the T-shirt was removed after The Verge asked about it. TikTok and Amazon have rules against hate speech and offensive content, respectively, that apply to product listings, but their systems can’t catch everything. And as long as there is incentive to spam marketplaces with the lowest quality products, the stream of junk will continue.
There is more for sale than ever before — including hateful clothing — yet shopping online feels monotonous. By now, we all know our place in this equation: the hustlers pump out SKUs, shoppers sift through a firehose of fake (in more than one sense of the word) products, and platforms promise to clean up their act. The listings for sale today might be gone tomorrow, but there will always be more where those came from.
