The National Lottery have seen their latest PR campaign go horrifically wrong as people hijacked it to spread vile messages online.
The original campaign saw athletes holding billboards with their names on them and then asked Twitter users to retweet it with #Represent.
The users that did, would then be rewarded with a thank you tweet showing the star holding a sign with their name on it – seems friendly enough right?
Well unfortunately for the National Lottery, the automated system used to load the names onto the cards, was unable to filter out offensive entries.
People took it as a chance to post disgusting messages writing statements about those who are dead, in prison, or missing.
Trolls wrote about various people, including Bradley Lowery, Jimmy Saville and Madeleine McCann.
Fortunately, the National Lottery were able to quickly regain control of their account and issued an apology early this morning.
Despite damage already being done, they tweeted:
We are aware that some people are maliciously targeting our British Athletics Twitter campaign with offensive and abhorrent content.
We are dealing with this as quickly as possible and are hugely sorry for any offence caused by this malicious act.
Many Twitter users shared their disgust on the site:
It’s hard to fathom that in this day and age, the general public still can’t be trusted with things like this, but those are the perils of the internet.
