Humour can be problematic online. It’s ever tempting to go riskier yet doing so is fraught with danger. So found gamer electronics brand Razer, when an ill-advised phallic jest at Apple’s expense led to the kind of social media spat that we’ve seen time and again.
The joke was a crude at best, mocking the recent news that Apple was removing regular USB slots and SD Card slots from the upcoming version of the MacBook Pro.
/Polygon /Twitter
You see what they did there? S? D? Right?
Many of the reactions online were outraged at the implications of one company directing another company to go down on it. The reasoning for their offense ran from plain old inappropriateness to parallels with fratboy misogyny and allusions to the recent ‘gamergate’ scandal. Because it’s 2016 and voicing your anger online is really the true eSport of the 21st century.
In the wake of the backlash Razer responded with a much more politically correct defense in an effort to cool things down.
/Polygon
When this didn’t seem to help at all and the media started to take notice, Razer’s social media team decided to take the Ripley option and delete the tweet entirely as damage control, but as we've learned on countless occasions, deleting tweets doesn’t work to end online hostilities and nuking the site from orbit only results in one thing: fallout.
After the tweet was deleted arguments simply escalated further. Now not only we people fighting over if the original post was controversial or not but also whether Razer had been unfairly bullied to remove it or had done the right thing.
There were tweets of support for Razer.
And there were tweets damning the company’s actions.
We aren’t going to take any moral high ground on the general ethics of sexual humour here. DigitalRev has indeed dipped into the naughty humour pool from time to time. However, we will posit that the Razer social media team perhaps should have avoided this particular phrasing, as the language came off unnecessarily aggressive towards Apple and was going to get noticed as such. Razer issued an apology themselves soon after the deletion.
Now though we don’t think a tech company like Razer making fellatio demands was particularly clever, we do somewhat understand their annoyance. We ourselves are not entirely pleased with Apple’s choices in relation to the MacBook Pro’s design.
What is the lesson? Though it’s sometimes all natural to get hot and bothered, before they put anything out, company social media teams should think long and hard or risk getting stuck with the short end of the stick. Just a tip.
. digitalrev.com2016-11-2 03:00