Gelato shop creates 'blackface' social media storm
Australia gelato company N2 Extreme Gelato which has stores in Melbourne, Sydney, Newtown, Fitzroy and Paris has copped it badly on social media aftr posting a caption about "blackface" over the weekend.
The company posted a photo of its new "honey charcoal vanilla" flavour on its Facebook page on Saturday.
The caption read: "Is it still considered blackface if it's just on your hand??? Anyway it's just spilt carbon so calm yo tits with our HONEY CHARCOAL VANILLA gelato! (Carbon dusting not included)"
It triggered an angry response on social media.
Some examples:
Napoleon Millar: "Well, this is incredibly inappropriate"
Rosin Daisy: "Where's the apology? Will never buy ice cream from you again.”
Juniper Maei: "Wow. Epic fail"
With that sort of response, the company updated the post several times over the weekend, omitting the blackface reference.
But that didn’t work.
People were angry that it had not deleted the post to begin with. Instead, N2 edited the original post.
The problem was that left the original post visible in the edit history.
As one angry customer Alice Elizabeth Harrison put it: “Wow you guys are seriously plebs to change your post copy and not respond to being called out for your racist slurs."
After creating the problem, the company came out with a mea culpa and suspended one person on its social media team and publicly apologised for posting.
“We deeply apologise for the insensitive and careless caption that was posted before this,’’ N2 Extreme Gelato said. “We have taken disciplinary action against the staff in question and the staff has been suspended as well as will no longer be any social media communications role. Deepest apologies that this was posted so thoughtlessly. We will ensure tight social media scrutiny controls are put in place.”
Thinktank Social founder Sam Mutimer criticised the way some companies deliberately posted controversial content, to get people talking about them.
"There's better ways to do it, that's the lamest way of gaining attention," Mutimer told goodfood.com.au.
"Social media is your brand voice, I don't understand how any brand could think about doing that for one second. It's caused them a PR nightmare within a few hours.”
by Leon Gettler, May 17th 2017
