The Patriots, the most popular NFL team and the first team to hit 1 million Twitter followers. To thank these fans, anyone who retweeted the “we hit 1million” message were sent an automatic customize image of a jersey with the fan’s twitter name on it. However a certain fan with a racist name soon “trolled” the flawed automatic response system from the Patriots’ Twitter account. A generated image of the fan’s racist Twitter name was imprinted on the jersey of an image and posted on the Patriots’ account for more than an hour. With a high number of retweets and favorites, the Patriots had to follow up with an immediate apology.

This is a prime example of large corporation automatically generating messages. In this case, a very offensive and racist name showed up in an official post made by the corporation and damaged their reputation. Although it is understandable that it is very unefficient to conduct real human posts for thousands of fans who retweeted the message, the robot they put in place should have had a better filtering system. This also relates directly to filtering out trolls from your fan pages which is extremely important to social media. Any company would want to advertise to people who matter instead of people who hate your brand/company.

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