Associated Press
Twitter was bad this decade.
- The brands were truly at it again all decade on Twitter.
- Some of the worst brand tweets were when US Airways tweeted an incredibly pornographic photo of a woman with a toy plane in her vagina and when people posted responses to Netflix's recent sex tweet.
- But, the worst brand tweet of the decade happened when the Vita Coco community manager peed in a jar and tweeted about it.
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It's been a long, long decade. And, there have been a lot of wild tweets.
Remember when Wendy's tweeted and then hastily deleted a Pepe meme, unaware the frog had become a hate symbol? Or when SpaghettiOs tweeted its mascot cheerfully holding the American flag to commemorate Pearl Harbor? Or - oh God - that time back in 2014 when US Airways tweeted an incredibly pornographic photo of a woman with a toy plane in her vagina?
Clearly, Twitter does not always bring out the best in brands. But, many of these have been accidents. Brands have apologized and tweets have been swiftly deleted.
Recently, however, there has been a rise of bad tweets that go un-deleted. As brands push what is acceptable behavior to its limits, there has been a recent wave of tweets that, a few years earlier, would have been seen as a massive lapse in judgement.
Netflix's prompt earlier in December asking followers for things "you can say during sex but also when you manage a brand twitter account" resulted in Kettle Brand Chips tweeting: "You can go elbow deep in me." Planter's Mr. Peanut won't stop tweeting about nutting, including a reference to #NoNutNovember. But, the worst purposefully disgusting tweet was by the Vita Coco community manager who peed in a jar.
In May, writer Tony Posnanski tweeted that Vita Coco's product "is nasty like all coconut water."
Vita Coco initially offered to send Posnanski some coconut water.
"F--- that. Save that nasty s--- for someone else. I would rather drink your social media persons piss than coconut water," Posnanski responded.
Vita Coco then responded with an image of its community coordinator, Lane Rawlings. in a bathroom holding a Vita Coco-branded jug full of what appears to be urine. The photo is accompanied by one word: "Address?"
The worst tweet of the decade.
The worst part about this incident was that it was not just a single employee who went rogue. Allison Finazzo, Vita Coco's brand director, told Business Insider at the time that the tweet was part of the company's "Impossible to Hate" campaign.
"We just launched a new campaign called Impossible to Hate, and to prove this claim, we created an algorithm to find the most negative people on the internet, and then had them try it live," Finazzo said. "Because if they don't hate it, no one will."
"We were going to try and impress Tony with Vita Coco Pressed, because he had previously written about how disgusting coconut water was," Finazzo continued. "But, he said he would rather drink our social media person's piss. And at Vita Coco, we'll go to great lengths to prove a hater wrong."
I do not think of myself as a prude. But, this is the moment brand Twitter officially went too far. And, as seen by Netflix's sex tweets and Mr. Peanut's willingness to regularly reference ejaculation, it is clear there is no going back now.
As the decade comes to a close, I am predicting that a fast-food brand will tweet its mascot in an explicit, sexual position in the next decade. It will make everyone uncomfortable, but also go viral. And, there will not be an apology.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author(s).