Coca-Cola Pulls Down Twitter Campaign After Hitler Prank

(RTTNews) - Coca-Cola Co. (KO) has pulled down its advertising campaign on Twitter after a gossip blog Gawker forced the beverage giant to inadvertently posts lines from Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Coke started its "Make it Happy" automated internet campaign during the Super Bowl last weekend that was intended to spread happiness among its followers. Coke asked its Twitter followers to mark negative tweets with the hashtag "#MakeItHappy." Coca-Cola would then convert those negative tweets into cute images using ASCII lettering code.

According to a Coca Cola statement, the campaign hoped to bring awareness and "ask people to think twice before posting negative messages and images."

"We hoped to inspire Americans to help make the Internet a more inclusive, happier place," Jennifer Healan, Coca-Cola's group director of integrated marketing content, in a statement on Sunday.

However, Coke was forced to pull down the #MakeItHappy campaign on Wednesday after Gawker took a dig at Coke's automated campaign that inadvertently converted lines from the infamous German dictator's autobiography to art forms.

When Gawker found that Coke had turned the "Fourteen Words" white nationalism slogan into a cute dog, it decided to create a Twitter bot, @MeinCoke, and tweet lines from Mein Kampf to check whether the soft drink giant will turn the lines to art.

Coca-Cola's Twitter feed displayed few lines of Mein Kampf's introduction on Tuesday, but was displayed as cute art like a cat playing drums or a smiling peeled banana or a man sleeping on a recliner.

In a blog post, Gawker's Max Read, wrote, "If we asked Coca-Cola to retweet, for example, the first four paragraphs of Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf, would it? As it turns out, yes. Gawker Editorial Labs director Adam Pash built us a bot to tweet the book line-by-line, and then tweet at Coke to #SignalBoost Hitler and #MakeItHappy."

Recently, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo had noted that the micro-blogging site "sucks" when it comes to dealing with trolls, or abusive messages that wean away users from the network.

In a memo to Twitter staff leaked to tech news website the Verge, Costolo said that bullying behavior on the network was driving users away, and that tough action is on the cards to tackle the menace.

KO is currently trading at $41.64, down $0.15 or 0.36%, on the NYSE.