Lessons Learned from the Patriots Twitter Error

The New England Patriots were previously making headlines because everyone was calling for Tom Brady’s head after a rough start to the season. Now, the Patriots are making headlines once again but it is not because of what they are doing on the field. Thursday night, a promotion that went wrong has caused a lot of backlash for the organization once again.

The Patriots were holding a promotion to thank their fans because they were the first NFL team to accomplish having more than one million Twitter followers. To do that, any fan who retweeted the Patriots tweet, would create custom jerseys that had the fan’s Twitter handle as the last name on the back of the jersey. While there is nothing wrong with personally thanking your fans, the Patriots encountered a major issue that has upset many fans.

As you can imagine, some Twitter handles out there are less than appropriate and the Patriots social team found out the hard way. Someone with a racist Twitter handle took advantage of the promotion and the automatic filtering system that the Patriots had set up didn’t catch the tweet. If you are really curious about what that handle was, a quick Google search will answer your question.

The tweet that was offensive was removed and the Patriots have issued apologies. Plenty of screen shots were taken first and like they say, nothing on the Internet is ever truly gone.

A cruel lesson learned by all about how humanity sucks sometimes and automation is never perfect. Plenty of other NFL teams are probably having discussions around what they will do when they reach one million fans and they are definitely having conversations around what they won’t do.