Amazon Removes Racist Messages From Listings Of Apple AirPods, Blame ‘Bad Actor’

Amazon on Sunday confirmed the removal of racist messages that appeared on certain listings for Apple’s popular AirPods in the U.K. The images containing the extreme racial slurs were enough to cause “AirPods” to trend on Twitter in the U.K. for a time over the weekend.

“We are removing the images in question and have taken action on the bad actor,” an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters.

The company has so far not elaborated on what sort of “bad actor” caused the messages to appear and why. The messages appeared on AirPods listings from third-party sellers, meaning that they were not visible on listings from Amazon or any other major vendor. The sellers in question were noted for being relatively new and having little or no customer feedback.

While the listings have since been removed, the grossly racist images can still be seen in posts made to Twitter. In them, the images show confrontational messages in somewhat broken English that repeatedly use the n-word. While the sellers had little feedback, the erroneous listings somehow sported thousands of star ratings.

“It’s @AmazonUK who need to deal with this offensive seller and product description [sic],” one Twitter user posted. “How was the seller verified and how is there no filter or tracker on offensive language on the whole site. Where did the reviews on the product below come from???”

“Our store maintains content guidelines which third party sellers are required to follow,” an Amazon spokesperson told the Verge. “As soon as this issue was raised, we investigated, removed the images in question and took action against the bad actor.”