We all post stupid things on social media from time to time. This writer spent three months thinking The Weekend was a Drake album and not an entirely different artist altogether, posting relentlessly. But I am just one person. But when a company, often staffed with an entire social media team, makes routine mistakes, at best it leaves users staring at their screen in disbelief, at worst, it causes public outrage and a lawsuit.
With that in mind, here are the top 10 company social media fails:
9. Fashion giant American Apparel celebrated July 4th in 2014, with an image of the space shuttle Challenger blowing up. The poster thought this was a picture of fireworks, not realising it was an international tragedy where people died. This is number 10 guys.
8. During the 2012 Presidential debates, the major appliance manufacturer Kitchen Aid decided to tweet about Obama. They said “Obamas GMA even knew it was going to be bad. She died 3 days b4 he became president. #nbcpolitics”. Bad taste, guys.
7. At the 2016 Oscars, Total Beauty thought that Whoopie Goldberg was Oprah, tweeting a picture of Whoopie with the caption “No idea Oprah was tatted!” The pair aren’t exactly the Olsen twins, are they?
6. DiGorno Pizza tweeted “#WhyIStayed You had pizza”. Seems harmless, right? Except when you consider that #WhyIStayed was a trending hashtag in 2014 after a now-infamous video surfaced of American footballer Ray Rice beat his girlfriend in an elevator. The hashtag was meant to start a conversation about domestic violence and while it was trending DiGorno saw it as an opportunity to plug their brand. Shameless.
5. No stranger to grabbing headlines, in 2016 the US Republican party tweeted about Rep.Tammy Duckworth having a long history of ‘not standing up for military veterans’. Duckworth had tragically lost her both legs in military action in Iraq and worked in the Department of Veteran Affairs. Their horrible choice of words along with their alternative facts did the party no favours.
4. Last year DC Comics posted a comic and said it was translated from “Pakistanian” instead of the nation’s actual language Urdu. The offence is one thing, but it’s the lack of basic research that’s truly astounding. Particularly from one of the most influential companies in the history of entertainment.
3. In 2015 a Twitter account belonging to the BBC’s Ahmen Khwaja inexplicably posted that the Queen of England had died. Ahmen later apologised and said that her phone was left at home unattended while she was at the doctor’s, caveating that it was a “silly prank”.
2. Microsoft wanted to learn about their users by talking to them on Twitter. So they created an AI named “Tay”. Tay started talking to thousands of internet trolls and very quickly devolved into an account tweeting streams of offensive hate speech. Tay was shut down shortly after.
1. Mattress Miracle in San Antonio, Texas made a 9/11 themed campaign where every mattress was the price of a twin mattress. The video concludes with two men cartoonishly falling on two piles of mattresses that look like towers. What were they thinking, you ask? Sadly, we can’t help with that one.
They say that there is no such thing as bad press. Those people clearly never saw these posts.