Do you think the odds got better for Yahoo after it hired Marissa Mayer as its new CEO? Well, think again, as the company posted one of the most obnoxious tweets we have seen in quite a while.
Last week, a Moscow judge sentenced a punk band to two years in prison. What musical act would you send to lockup, and why?
#HashOut— Yahoo! News (@YahooNews) August 20, 2012
As you may know, the tweet is an insensitive reference to the jailing and sentencing of female Russian musicians and activists Pussy Riot, which sparked public outrage around the world. It’s quite appalling to see that Yahoo News’ community manager or whoever is in charge of the Twitter account knows about the facts, and yet decides it’s a laughing matter.
In one way, this makes it even worse than Celeb Boutique’s moronic tweet about the Aurora shooting – at least it sounded like the fashion brand wasn’t aware of the tragedy.
More importantly, Yahoo isn’t a small, unknown fashion outlet. As a media giant, it should know better than this. Yet, it doesn’t seem to have anticipated its followers’ reaction. Here are a few responses to its original tweet:
RT
@margaretatwood: None! Because there are too many politicians+ fanatics worldwide jailing artists of all kinds for their art!#HashOut— pencanada (@PENCanada) August 20, 2012
@yahoonews Are you effing serious with that question? That’s very, very poor form. Be ashamed Yahoo.— Trunkman Productions (@TrunkmanUK) August 20, 2012
Update: As Twitter user @cawston points out, “Yahoo News’ #hashout was pre-planned to prove social media is NOT ‘an apocalyptically frivolous place.'” As a matter of fact, Yahoo published a post this morning about this new hashtag, which it describes as a talk show/Twitter game. If its ambition is to reinvent the future of journalism, the least we can say is that it’s not exactly a good start.
Update 2: Unsurprisingly, Yahoo News ended up apologizing on Twitter:
The goal of
#HashOut is to encourage debate around hot topics. We apologize to those who may have been offended by today’s question.— Yahoo! News (@YahooNews) August 20, 2012
Image credit: Alex E. Proimos
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