NY Comic Con Hijacks Attendees' Twitter Accounts, Issues Non-Apology Apology

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the super-villain dept

If anyone knows how to be polite, genteel, and appropriate, it’s certainly me. That falsehood said, it’s become increasingly difficult to keep up on what’s considered polite and what isn’t in this digital world. Still, one can try to keep up. So, after much trial and error, I now know it is not okay to take a dinner companion’s phone when he’s in the bathroom and use his Facebook app to vicariously profess his love for a mutual friend’s wife. Likewise, thou shalt not turn absent co-workers’ desktop backgrounds to photoshopped images of Martha Stewart’s head on Hitler’s body. You just don’t do those things.

But even I don’t require any practice to know that I shouldn’t hijack my customers’ Twitter accounts without their knowledge to pimp my own wares. Yet it seems this seemingly low-level of comprehension eluded the New York Comic Convention.

Fans, celebrities and press attending New York Comic Con on Thursday sent out laudatory tweets expressing excitement to be at the annual convention — or at least it looked like they did, as the tweets were published entirely without their permission or knowledge.

The tweets were tied to attendees’ NYCC badges. This year, conference organizers Reedpop allowed people to pre-register their badges online. The badges have radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips that are tied to a user’s identity in order to curb counterfeits. Attendees were then invited to connect their social-media accounts to their badge, although it wasn’t explicitly stated that NYCC could post to Facebook or Twitter on their behalf. As people checked in to the convention on Thursday, many published tweets looked authentic (and were written in conversational language), but were not written by attendees.

Those tweets were basically ecstatic exclamations about how great the NYCC is, how excited the tweeter was about attending certain functions therein, and ostensibly about how the NYCC had simultaneously cured cancer and ended global terrorism as we know it. The point is that attendees, who may or may not have been as excited as their hijacked Twitter accounts suggested, weren’t exactly pleased to find themselves being turned into ventriloquist dummies by the convention. Many of those same Twitter accounts that had been hijacked were suddenly tweeting back to the convention’s Twitter account with angry complaints. As a result, the NYCC issued this statement:

As you may have seen yesterday, there were some posts to Twitter and Facebook issued by New York Comic Con on behalf of attendees after RFID badges were registered. This was an opt-in function after signing in, but we were probably too enthusiastic in our messaging and eagerness to spread the good word about NYCC. We have since shut down this service completely and apologize for any perceived overstep. Please accept our apologies and have an absolutely excellent time this weekend. -Your friends at NYCC

Allow me to translate this for you: “Since you didn’t magically understand that this opt-in service doesn’t involve us informing you of exactly what you’re opting into, please accept our sardonic and barely sincere apology and just go read some comics or whatever.” When the entire premise of your “apology” is a lie (it isn’t opt-in when you hide what is being opted into), it loses the moniker of apology and will instead be identified as bullshit. Pretty ballsy when you consider that the convention goers, celebrity attendees, and those actually buying booths at the convention encompass approximately all your customers. Enjoy the publicity, NYCC!

Filed Under: hijacking, social media
Companies: ny comic con, nycc, twitter