Audio By Carbonatix
ABC affiliate WPLG Local 10’s website has crossed over to the dark side. Apparently, hungry for pageviews, the station posted a slide show featuring photos from a recent Star Wars convention, complete with mocking captions like “Dateless men for as far as the eye can see.”
Star Wars fans didn’t appreciate the mockery and accused the station of cyber-bullying across blogs, Change.org, Twitter, and Facebook. So the station deleted the slide show and posted a half-hearted apology on Facebook. Then Local 10 deleted the apology after fans complained it didn’t seem sincere, and then it deleted a bunch of negative Facebook comments. This is basically a masterclass in how not to deal with web outrage.
PinkSith.com caught wind that the station posted a bunch of picture of attendees of the recent Star Wars Celebration 6 in Orlando, Florida, complete with mocking captions such as these:
The slide show then incited a war between Star Wars fans and the Miami news station.
A Change.org petition asking for an apology was launched.
Then came the tweets:
The slide show was then taken down, and this apology was posted on Facebook:
As detailed on PinkSith, the station then deleted the apology after receiving complaints that it didn’t seem sincere, and also admitted it deleted user comments:
We guess there are two lessons here: Don’t cyber-bully geeks if you’re a professional news organization, and don’t post unfunny, lazy, pageview-baiting shit in the first place.
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