Company Twitter Account Retweets Every Bad Thing Said about It, Probably Needs a Lesson in Social Media

You’d think a company like AngelHack, which organizes collaborative “hackathons” around the country, would be better at navigating Twitter than they appear. Then again, you’d also think they’d be better at not letting their CEO say really disgusting things about the homeless, and that hasn’t been working out very well for them.

Since CEO Greg Gropman took to Facebook recently and complained ad nauseum about the “crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash” that get between him and his ideal view of San Francisco, people on the Internet have not been too happy with him or his company. Gropman has already apologized and taken the Facebook post down, of course, but Twitter’s still buzzing with the news — and so is one of AngelHack’s official Twitter accounts, an automated bot that appears to be retweeting literally any mention of the company or its CEO.  Which, yes, includes the bad stuff. An example:

To be fair, @AngelHack_Live isn’t the company’s default Twitter account — that’s actually @AngelHack, which appears to be a more curated source of news about AngelHack events. The “live” Twitter is just a supplemental account for users who… um, really want to know exactly what everyone thinks about Angelhack at all times and who don’t know how to search tweets themselves. Considering that this retweeting has gone on for fiveish hours with no sign of stopping, though, you’d think that someone would have maybe told the bot to stop tweeting right now.

Unless, of course, this is part of AngelHack’s plan, as some Twitter users have postulated:

hey, the Angelhack bot retweets everything, including negative content about its founder/CEO. guess what, no one accepts that non-apology!

— Swade (@_terroirism_) December 11, 2013

It would be really nice if this turned out to be a giant ridiculous hoax a la the Pace Picante Salsa story we heard about over at TLDR, with a bunch of made-up people whining about each other in tweets and threatening to fire one another for our amusement, but sadly that’s probably not going to happen.

(via Laughterkey on Tumblr and ValleyWag, image via Twitter)

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