Patriots’ #1MillionPatriots Twitter Celebration Interrupted By A Racist Troll

Beware social media robots; they don’t always know a troll when they see one.

The New England Patriots are the latest to learn that embarrassing lesson after the NFL team’s Twitter account auto-posted a racial slur in an image Thursday.

In celebration of becoming the first NFL team to hit 1 million Twitter followers, the Patriots were thanking fans; anyone who retweeted the Patriots’ we-hit-1-million message was sent an auto-generated response featuring a jersey personalized with a Twitter handle.

Unfortunately, someone with a terribly offensive screen name triggered the bot, prompting this tweet (displayed here in edited form):

The tweet stayed up for more than an hour — and as you can see in the screen shot received a troublingly high volume of retweets and favorites — before it was deleted. The Patriots’ account quickly followed up with an apology:

We apologize for the regrettable tweet that went out from our account. Our filtering system failed & we will be more vigilant in the future.

— New England Patriots (@Patriots) November 14, 2014

Wisely, the Patriots have also turned off the robot.