Amid heavy criticism and an intensifying online backlash, the Associated Press quietly deleted a tweet asking people to bid on an NFT of migrant boat adrift at sea.
In what the news agency initially described as a feature video of "migrants drifting in an overcrowded boat on the Mediterranean," dozens of people in red jackets are seen sitting in an inflatable boat moving through Libyan waters.
The AP advertised it as "tomorrow's drop" on the AP Photography NFT Marketplace on Thursday and saw swift online backlash as a result.
'Grotesque Way To Earn A Profit':
"This is a grotesque way to earn a profit," wrote one user in the replies of the since-deleted post on Twitter (TWTR).
"Wait, hang on - are you actively monetizing imagery of human suffering? Is that what I'm seeing here?" wrote another.
The tweet disappeared shortly after it was posted but not before Twitter users captured its existence.
"The Associated Press has deleted a tweet advertising an NFT that sure looked a whole lot like an attempt to make money off the plight of desperate migrants," Caroline Orr Bueno, a behavioral scientist at the University of Maryland, wrote on Twitter.
In response, the AP issued a statement calling the migrant boat NFT a "poor choice of imagery" and said that it would not be put up for auction.
Why Were They Selling It In The First Place?
Earlier this year, the AP launched a marketplace where it sells "award-winning contemporary and historic photojournalism" in the form of NFTs.
Standing for nonfungible tokens, NFTs are primarily a way of asserting ownership over a piece of online content like photos, music and videos.
The content of the image can sometimes be irrelevant (the monkeys portrayed in the Bored Ape Yacht Club series can sell for millions simply because of investor interest) but can also be a way to claim ownership over an iconic photograph or video.
While some NFTs may be better choices than others, AP's goal was always to sell photojournalism that captures historic moments and conflicts .
One of the first photographs that the agency made available was a Pulitzer-winning photo of a Jewish settler challenging Israeli officers in the West Bank in 2006.
After the backlash over the migrant boat NFT, AP replaced its Thursday drop with three images from German photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus. Another Pulitzer-winning journalist, Niedringhaus covered war zones extensively for the agency before being killed by a police officer in 2014.
