Coca-Cola pulled a Twitter ad campaign that it introduced during the Super Bowl because a counter-campaign tricked the #MakeItHappy bot into Tweeting bits of Hitler's "Mein Kampf," according to The Guardian.
The soda company asked people to respond to negative Tweets with the hashtag #MakeItHappy and an automated algorithm would change the Tweets into an image of something happy, like a cat playing drums.
On Tuesday, Coca-Cola was filling its own Twitter feed with pre-Nazi phrases. By Wednesday, Coke's ad campaign was suspended completely.
A Coca-Cola spokesperson emailed a statement to Adweek:
"The #MakeItHappy message is simple: The Internet is what we make it, and we hoped to inspire people to make it a more positive place. It's 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."
Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo took full responsibility, according to an internal memo to staff obtained by the Verge:
"We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.
"I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It's absurd. There's no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It's nobody else's fault but mine, and it's embarrassing.
"We're going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them."
