Gawker did a funny this week by making Coca-Cola tweet racist stuff, and it was hilarious. In addition to being side-splittingly humorous, the prank actually raises a serious question, although perhaps not the one Gawker intended: should brands be held responsible for stupid troll attacks that they obviously didn’t intend or expect?

The prank took advantage of Coca-Cola’s “Make It Happy” campaign, launched in conjunction with the Super Bowl, which invited users to combat online nastiness by retweeting negative tweets with the #MakeItHappy hashtag; Coca-Cola would then turn the negative tweets into cheery little word-pictures on its Twitter account. Overall the idea is a little bit, I don’t know, silly and sappy, but it’s a nice sentiment and people seem to go for that kind of stuff.

Those naughty imps at Gawker used the #MakeItHappy hashtag to tweet the opening passages from Adolf Hitler’s frothing memoir-manifesto Mein Kampf, which Coca-Cola’s account dutifully turned into happy images of a balloon dog, a sloth snoozing in a recliner, a cat playing the drums, and so on.

The prank targeted an obvious flaw in Coca-Cola’s system, which automatically rendered text into images without much in the way of human oversight. In that way Gawker pedantically made the same point that has already been made any number of times elsewhere -- to wit, that marketers risk damaging their brands by turning control over to unknown entities online.

All this naturally raises the question: who cares? Does anyone out there think that because someone played a trick on Coke, the company is actually racist? Does it really warrant suspending the whole campaign? Indeed, does the presence of tiresome trolls and preening pedants on the Internet really obviate all interactive and participatory marketing (however silly the idea was in the first place)?

(Incidentally, aside from the first “Fourteen Word” oath, a racist classic, the bulk of the Hitler quotations Gawker submitted weren’t identifiably racist, or even particularly Hitlerian in that venomous spittle-flecked way for which Mr. Sweaty Cowlick was so infamous.

True, there is some talk of uniting countries with Germanic blood, and his famous statement that “the tears of war will produce the daily bread for the generations to come,” but nothing that would really register on our fine-tuned 21st-century offense-o-meters. Rather, it’s a standard, dry, colorless opening to a memoir that could have been written any time in the 19th or early 20th century -- and anyone who cared to decipher the text from the Coke ASCII pictures would probably just find it puzzling.)