Amazon failed to adequately alert more than 300,000 customers to serious risks—including death and electrocution—that US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) testing found with more than 400,000 products that third parties sold on its platform.
The CPSC unanimously voted to hold Amazon legally responsible for third-party sellers' defective products. Now, Amazon must make a CPSC-approved plan to properly recall the dangerous products—including highly flammable children's pajamas, faulty carbon monoxide detectors, and unsafe hair dryers that could cause electrocution—which the CPSC fears may still be widely used in homes across America.
While Amazon scrambles to devise a plan, the CPSC summarized the ongoing risks to consumers:
If the [products] remain in consumers’ possession, children will continue to wear sleepwear garments that could ignite and result in injury or death; consumers will unwittingly rely on defective [carbon monoxide] detectors that will never alert them to the presence of deadly carbon monoxide in their homes; and consumers will use the hair dryers they purchased, which lack immersion protection, in the bathroom near water, leaving them vulnerable to electrocution.
Instead of recalling the products, which were sold between 2018 and 2021, Amazon sent messages to customers that the CPSC said "downplayed the severity" of hazards.
In these messages—"despite conclusive testing that the products were hazardous" by the CPSC—Amazon only warned customers that the products "may fail" to meet federal safety standards and only "potentially" posed risks of "burn injuries to children," "electric shock," or "exposure to potentially dangerous levels of carbon monoxide."
Typically, a distributor would be required to specifically use the word "recall" in the subject line of these kinds of messages, but Amazon dodged using that language entirely. Instead, Amazon opted to use much less alarming subject lines that said, "Attention: Important safety notice about your past Amazon order" or "Important safety notice about your past Amazon order."
Amazon then left it up to customers to destroy products and explicitly discouraged them from making returns. The e-commerce giant also gave every affected customer a gift card without requiring proof of destruction or adequately providing public notice or informing customers of actual hazards, as can be required by law to ensure public safety.
Further, Amazon's messages did not include photos of the defective products, as required by law, and provided no way for customers to respond. The commission found that Amazon "made no effort" to track how many items were destroyed or even do the minimum of monitoring the "number of messages that were opened."
When I was a kid I thought that clearly understandable things (punishment is intended to prevent doing something again, that is, to clearly undo the benefit for the criminal ; best of all be worth twice that benefit ; if not, then those issuing punishment are clearly corrupt, and the punishment should be reconsidered, and they should be removed from power and investigated ; and so on through all the chain) not being met will be seen and violently protested, but later I learned what gaslighting is!
Say, legalism is gaslighting. As in "you should fight evil only by the law which is made by that evil, and you should only consider that law not a law when you've managed to remove it by the rules made by evil".
Any other thing which says "things are normal, no need to break stuff, everybody thinks it's normal, you should too" is gaslighting.
We are a whole civilization gaslighted by parasites into not crushing them.