NEW YORK — To put it in social media terms, the New York Police Department got trolled.
The nation’s largest police force learned the hard way that there are legions online devoted to short-circuiting even the best-intentioned public relations campaign – in this case, the NYPD’s Twitter invitation to people to post feel-good photos of themselves posing with New York’s Finest.
Additional Photos
What #myNYPD got instead was a montage of hundreds of news images of baton-wielding cops arresting protesters, pulling suspects by the hair, unleashing pepper spray and taking down a bloodied 84-year-old man for jaywalking.
It was a failure of epic proportions, with the hashtag among the most-trafficked in the world Tuesday, creating a public relations nightmare for a new NYPD leadership intent on creating a more community-friendly force.
“We’ve seen instances before where a hashtag can become a bash-tag,” said Glen Gilmore, who teaches social media marketing at Rutgers University. “When you’re in the social space, it’s tough to predict what’s going to happen.”
A similar meltdown came last November when investment giant JP Morgan Chase, which had been paying billions in fines stemming from the financial crisis, asked followers on Twitter to post career advice questions. Among them: “Did you have a specific number of people’s lives you needed to ruin before you considered your business model a success?”
McDonald’s inadvertently ordered up some bad publicity in 2012 with its #McDStories campaign. Sample response: “I walked into a McDonald’s and could smell the Type II diabetes.”
The #myNYPD misfire comes at a time when new Police Commissioner William Bratton is trying to re-brand the department to counter criticism that it has been trampling on people’s civil rights. Last week, it disbanded an intelligence unit that spied on Muslim neighborhoods, and it has promised reforms to the crime-fighting tactic known as stop and frisk.
Bratton acknowledged Wednesday that the Twitter campaign may not have been fully thought through.
“Was that particular reaction from … some of the police adversaries anticipated? To be quite frank, it was not,” Bratton said. “But at the same time it’s not going to cause us to change any of our efforts to be very active on social media.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.