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Coke Suspends Automated Campaign After Being Tricked Into Tweeting From 'Mein Kampf'

Coca-Cola has suspended the automated tweeting that's a core part of its #MakeItHappy campaign, after a Gawker prank.

As previously reported, following its Super Bowl ad, the brand launched a series of social media options enabling consumers to participate in the campaign's stated mission of making the Internet a happier, more positive place — including a means of transforming negative tweets to positive ones. Twitter users have been encouraged to "happify" Twitter by replying to negative tweets with the #MakeItHappy hashtag,  whereupon the original tweets are transformed into cheerful pieces of art, using ASCII lettering code.

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Gawker tweeted a white supremacist slogan adapted from Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ("the Fourteen Words"), using the campaign hashtag, and Coke's program unwittingly turned it into a cartoon dog (shown). 

Subsequently, Gawker created the Twitter handle @MeinCoke and built a bot to tweet the first four paragraphs of the infamous book, line by line, at Coke, using #MakeItHappy and #SignalBoost Hitler. 

Gawker editor Max Read pointed up the potential hazards for brands of having well-intended technology used against them in a post detailing his site's stunt and showing the resulting images created, headlined "Make Hitler Happy: The Beginning of Mein Kampf, as Told by Coca-Cola."  

Coca-Cola issued a statement saying that it is "unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn't. Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign."

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