Originally published at: KFC suggests Germany commemorate Kristallnacht with "more tender cheese" | Boing Boing
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Beat that, Nihilist Arby’s!!!
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Blaming it on an “error in our system,”
That’s an interesting way of saying “we have a neo-Nazi edgelord in our social media marketing department”.
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KFC blamed the message on “an error in our system.”
Well, that’s late stage capitalism for you, eh?
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Kentucky Fried Chicken can go to hell.
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That sort of thing can happen to the best of us. Earlier this year the Social Democrat Party (SPD) of the German federal state of Hesse set off a shitstorm by sending Jewish citizens “Yom Kippur greetings” in a social-media message illustrated with a beautiful picture of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
(The Dome of the Rock is a famous Islamic monument, off-limits to Jews, which occupies the spot where purportedly the Jewish Temple used to be until it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.)
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Oh you know the Arby’s Macht Fries promotion at the new Auschwitz location is coming soon.
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I’d love to know what “system error” sends out super specific nazi references
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That sounds like a well meaning goof, not being aware of what the image you googled for “temple in Jerusalem” was.
I am hoping this is as dumb as an automatic tweet script where you plug in “It’s [notable day]. Celebrate with cheese!” For 97% of things on the calendar, that will be fine. “It’s national Arbor Day…”, “It’s National Teacher’s day…” etc. But when you have a serious topic/memorial day/religious event on the event calendar, you need to make sure it is excluded or you get something like this.
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I almost feel like we need to do remembrance on Kristallnacht by melting and eating cheese figurines of famous Nazis.
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I suspect a (very American) programmer decided that every commemorated day must be a holiday and set up an automated system that tweeted out about “celebrating” every presumed holiday in all the countries where KFC does business. So someone being really “smart” rather than evil. (Either that, or instead of an automated system, it was a [very American] intern working social media who doesn’t know shit about anything.)
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It wasn’t a tweet. Per the BBC, it was apparently a push notification via a KFC app.
Nevertheless, disgusting.
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That wouldn’t be an error in their system but a fundamentally broken system overseen by incompetent managers.
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Oh yeah, it’s definitely not “an error” - it’s a whole broken set of idiotic assumptions and bad management at best. But they’re pretending it’s something it’s not to minimize it, of course.
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Just in case intent wasn’t clear here: the holocaust enrages me. Melting and consuming effigies of famous nazis wouldn’t fix anything, but doing so would be for me a little cathartic.
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Just a heads up, we don’t really say “Kristallnacht” anymore in Germany, because it’s a propaganda term the Nazis coined themselves. Makes it sound all festive when it was anything but. It’s usually called Pogromnacht now
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This is my guess as well. This reads like a script someone wrote for the corporate Twitter bot that is tweeting “Try ${PROMOTION} for ${HOLIDAY}” and iterating through the first database of German holidays they found. Probably written by a script kiddie in the marketing department in a US head office.
In that sense it is a “bug” or “error” but by now you’d think a billion dollar corporation would know better than to trust its public-facing Twitter feed to a script kiddie in marketing.
Edit:
Ah, this opens up a lot of possibilities. Push notifications on mobile apps are tricky to test (I was a mobile developer for 10 years) and it’s actually surprisingly easy to accidentally send out a test push message to the live servers when you meant to send it to the sandbox environment for QA.
Given that, two likely possibilities:
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It was a test push using an older unsanitized database of holidays that exists on the debug servers. This sort of thing is common. Our debug server had a bunch of porn images for user profiles because we had an edgelord lead programmer for a while who left and it took literally years to find all those images and remove them.
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It was a test with a manually entered holiday, and the person testing it is an edgelord twit who thought it was funny but didn’t expect the push to leave the sandbox.
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Based on a fundamental error in the set of assumptions that someone made in setting up such a system in the first place, based on a very American understanding of conflating memorialized days with “holidays” that one “celebrates.” (I mean, even our most somber holiday, Memorial Day, is a corporate sales day to celebrate, now.) American programmers routinely make all sorts of ignorant assumptions about people’s names, etc. because their frame of reference is so limited.
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That was my first thought, and presumably what they were implying when they blamed it on software.
But then I thought, hmm, KFC definitely pays multiple college graduates to run its social media (and is notorious for elaborate PR stunts). Would they really set up a basic-ass cron job like this to generate one or two posts per week, with no human oversight? Comms people, even when idiots, tend to be pretty controlling about these things.
I don’t think it was a mistake or a fifth columnist within KFC’s political directorate. I‘m betting some asshole switched their pocket calculator to shitposting mode, and correctly calculated that an “accidental” nazi tweet would be a good way to spread the word about their fried chicken + cheese thing.
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