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 […]

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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):

patriots-racist-troll

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:

Wisely, the Patriots have also turned off the robot.


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About the author

Martin Beck
Contributor
Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.

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