The National Lottery ran a disastrous social media campaign yesterday evening. The idea was that anyone who retweeted its post celebrating the achievements of British athletes would see their username on a sign, gleefully held up by one of the athletes.
@kim_holdaway Our players are the backbone of our @britathletics team. Thank you! #REPRESENT 🇬🇧
People started changing their usernames into offensive and malicious phrases, which the generator converted into signs.
Oh dear, the National Lottery have messed up here.
Most of the tweets have been deleted. But some have been screengrabbed and circulated on Twitter, while people called out the lottery.
National lottery are u okk?
And branded the signs as racist.
National Lottery page set up an automated bot to thank their fans with their names & you lot are making your names into sumn racist. Gross.
Wow! Someone somewhere at the National Lottery is getting fired tomorrow! These tweets are insane 😱
Someone at The National Lottery is getting fired tomorrow...
Many noted that a similar thing happened to Walkers Crisps back in May and were shocked that the National Lottery did not learn from that.
Beware of idiots. UK National Lottery @TNLUK joins @walkers_crisps in having online pictures getting defaced
The National Lottery issued an apology in the early hours of Tuesday morning and called some of the cards "offensive" and "abhorrent".
We are aware that some people are maliciously targeting our British Athletics Twitter campaign with offensive and abhorrent content. (1/2)
"We are dealing with this as quickly as possible and are hugely sorry for any offence caused by this malicious act," it said.
We are dealing with this as quickly as possible and are hugely sorry for any offence caused by this malicious act. (2/2)