Coke drops ad campaign after being tricked into tweeting Mein Kampf

Coca-Cola has dropped a week-old advertising campaign after it was tricked by a bot into tweeting the introduction to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Coke's Make It Happy campaign was debuted in an ad aired during Sunday's Super Bowl, the idea being that a Twitter algorithm would convert nasty and negative tweets using ASCII into pictures of happy things, like a balloon mouse or a banana with a massive grin on its face.

So it was that Coke's official account tweeted a series of images, including a smiling burger, containing secret race hate messages at @MeinCoke, before realising what had happened and deleting all of them.

A day later it decided to pull the campaign entirely, blaming Gawker's editorial labs director Adam Pash for proving why we can't have nice things on the internet.

"The #MakeItHappy message is simple: the internet is what we make it, and we hoped to inspire people to make it a more positive place. It's unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn't," a Coca-Cola spokesperson told AdWeek.

"Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign."

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