Biggest Social Media Fails of 2017

Biggest Social Media Fails of 2017

Author: Rose Leadem / Source: Entrepreneur Image credit: Mohd Samsul Mohd Said | Getty Images It's been a big year for social media fail

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Biggest Social Media Fails of 2017
Image credit: Mohd Samsul Mohd Said | Getty Images

It’s been a big year for social media fails — and the year has hardly started.

It only took five days into 2017 for a major company to embarrass itself on social media, accidentally posting a tweet containing a racial slur.

Since then we’ve seen some other pretty high-profile fails, including one from the White House Press Secretary (who tweeted what could be his password) and a host of spelling snafus, including one from the Department of Education.

Related: 7 Social Media Fails So Disastrous, They Shocked the Experts

This is only the beginning, though. As we found last year, when it comes to marketing and social media, it’s all too easy for a small error to have big implications. Take a look at these cautionary tales — and let them be a warning to us all.

Check out the major social media fails of 2017 — so far.

Biggest Social Media Fails of 2017

When you think of politics, fast food chain McDonald’s doesn’t typically come to mind. But on the morning of March 16, the company’s Twitter account was pretty vocal.

With what the company attributed to the work of a hacker, @McDonaldsCorp sent out a tweet to its 150,000-plus followers that bashed President Donald Trump, calling him “disgusting,” pointing out his “tiny hands” and wishing Barack Obama was back in office.

The tweet lived on McDonald’s Twitter page for a solid 30 minutes before being removed, and the company addressed the mishap in a tweet.

Twitter notified us that our account was compromised. We deleted the tweet, secured our account and are now investigating this.

— McDonald’s (@McDonaldsCorp) March 16, 2017

Hacker or not, McDonald’s may have lost a loyal customer.

Biggest Social Media Fails of 2017
Image credit: Kevin Winter | Getty Images

Feb. 26, 2017, marks one of the biggest flops in Oscars history, when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong movie as Best Picture. It wasn’t Beatty or Dunaway’s faults, though, the error was caused by PricewaterhouseCoopers accountant Brian Cullinan. He was working backstage during the awards show and his only job was to make sure the right envelopes got in the right hands — and he was specifically warned to stay offline so there would be no distractions.

Turns out, a simple warning wasn’t enough. Cullinan was too busy tweeting during the Oscars that he gave Beatty the wrong envelope. (Hey — who wouldn’t want to tweet a picture from backstage at the Oscars?)

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Biggest Social Media Fails of 2017

It’s one thing for a government agency to misspell something. It’s another when the U.S. Department of Education does it.

On Feb. 12, the Department of Education tweeted a quote by late civil rights activist and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois — or as the agency spelled his name on Twitter, “W.E.B. DeBois.” That’s right, the Department of Education misspelled Du Bois’s name.

Education must not simply teach work – it must teach life. – W.E.B. DeBois pic.twitter.com/Re4cWkPSFA

— US Dept of Education (@usedgov) February 12, 2017

To make matters worse, in its public apology tweet, the agency made another grammatical error — offering its “deepest apologizes” for the earlier typo. After receiving a great deal of backlash from the Twitter community, the department gave its apology one more try hours later.

— Erick Fernandez (@ErickFernandez) February 12, 2017

Biggest Social Media Fails of 2017

Country singer Faith Hill has a lot in common with R&B singer Faith Evans — they’re both singers, they share the same first name, they … OK, that’s about it. On Friday, Feb. 3, CNN tweeted that Hill would be releasing an album of duets with The Notorious B.I.G., who passed away…

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