Dear Coke: You Screwed Up
The Olympics sponsor contends programming was to blame for responses that many considered antigay when pro-LGBT words were entered into various interactive portions of the brand’s site.
Coca-Cola has apologized and removed the offending program after LGBT activists called out the company, a 2014 Winter Olympics sponsor, for promoting a social media tool that let users customize their own virtual can of Coke but refused to recognize certain words, including “gay,” “lesbian,” and “queer.”
Over the weekend, AmericaBlog uncovered a South African website that invited users to “Share a Virtual Coke” but responded to submissions of pro-gay words with an error message reading, “Oops. Let’s pretend you didn’t just type that. Please try another name.”
Tuesday morning, Coca-Cola published an apology on its website, stating that the program was incorrectly formatted and that the website has been pulled down until the glitch can be corrected.
Explaining that the “Share a Coke” campaign was intended to allow users to customize a Coke can with their own name in the brand’s iconic logo script, Coca-Cola acknowledged that the version hosted on the company’s South African site didn’t restrict submissions to names.
