BBC Investigates Why Its Site Branded Facebook Users “Saddos”

As we reported yesterday, a BBC webpage relating to the Olympics included text over the weekend that encouraging readers to “Become a saddo on Facebook”. For those unfamiliar with the term, the page was essentially saying “Facebook users have no life”, not the kind of message you’d expect from a respectable media organisation.

So, what happened? Ben Gallop, Head of Interactive at BBC Sport, has been in touch with us confirming that the BBC’s 2012 Olympics site is still under construction and that they are currently looking into why a test page was published.

“(The text was) clearly a mistake, and we are looking into how a test page came to be published. The 2012 Olympics site is still being built, but needless to say some of the placeholder text that was up there at the weekend was inappropriate and we apologise.”

One of the commenters on our our original story noted that the case was “A worthy example to us all as to why Lorem Ipsum is so valuable and why bored designers should not express their feelings in placeholder text, even if it keeps them amused.” Gallop agrees and we imagine future test builds of the site will be crammed full of latin – and not published.