Warning to social media managers everywhere: Make sure you proofread before you post. Case in point, the tweet above.
Yahoo Finance learned that lesson the hard way, when the site tweeted a post about President-Elect Donald Trump wanting a “bigger” Navy, and somehow substituted the word “n” for the “b,” turning the tweet into a racial slur. Twitter users responded by creating a Twitter hashtag using the slur and the word Navy to mock Yahoo Finance’s unfortunate gaffe.
Heavy has blurred out part of the racial slur, but you get the drift.
@tyronedmcgrue man you got to look up the hashtag with Donald Trump and Yahoo Finance last night
Yahoo has apologized for the unfortunate tweet, which was deleted but had already ricocheted around the Internet. “We deleted an earlier tweet due to a spelling error. We apologize for the mistake,” Yahoo Finance wrote on its Twitter page.
We deleted an earlier tweet due to a spelling error. We apologize for the mistake.
It reportedly took Yahoo a full 20 minutes to spot the error.
It didn’t take Twitter users quite as long:
A Twitter post on the typo.
But does Trump really want a bigger Navy? In case you’re curious, the tweet linked to a story that reported, “President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to maintain a naval fleet of 350 ships as part of an historic buildup of the U.S. military, but his ambitions come with a stiff price tag.”
Twitter response to the Yahoo Finance tweet was fast and furious, with many people mocking the site for its racial snafu.
NYDailyNews: Yahoo Finance in typo tweet: “Trump wants a much n—-r navy” t.co/4vTdCHMpca
It’s impossible to reprint the funniest responses to the gaffe here without repeating the racial slur, but you can check them out on Twitter. Some people wrote that they couldn’t figure out why the bizarre Trump Navy hashtag was trending. It didn’t take them long to learn.