Hitler Bot Hijacks Coke's Twitter Campaign

It was almost inevitable that Coca-Cola's automated campaign to combat online negativity would be hijacked by pranksters—but the "Make It Happy" team probably wasn't expecting a Hitler bot. The campaign turned the words of negative tweets into happy ASCII cartoons, but after noticing that a white supremacist slogan had received the "Make It Happy" treatment, Gawker set up its @MeinCoke Twitter bot, which tweeted text from Mein Kampf. After a sizable chunk of the beginning of Adolf Hitler's autobiography had been turned into cute pictures of things like cats with drum kits, Coke suspended the whole campaign, reports the Guardian.

Coke—which said the aim of the campaign was to "tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media feeds and comment threads" online—sounds as if it's very disappointed in Gawker. "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," a spokeswoman tells Adweek. "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." (When Miami rapper Pitbull took part in an online campaign for Walmart, the Internet sent him to Kodiak, Alaska.)