As Halloween draws nearer, the Walmart trust and safety compliance team is working overdrive. The team is responsible for filtering out costumes in Walmart’s online offerings that could be deemed offensive and lead to a public relations firestorm, according to Bloomberg.
Workers scour the site’s approximately 40,000 costumes—many from third-party vendors—to remove items like transgender Caitlyn Jenner, a decapitated Cecil the Lion, and a fake “Arab” nose. The results of inaction have already been made clear to Walmart: this week, an Israeli soldier costume for kids that passed unnoticed through the detectors led to calls for boycotts of the Super Store. (It was quickly removed.)
The trust and safety compliance was also responsible for pulling items with Confederate flag imagery in the wake of the Charleston, South Carolina shooting at a historically African-American church that killed nine.