by MAX READ
“Make it happy!” Coca-Cola’s new marketing campaign exhorts. The campaign, introduced during a Super Bowl commercial, is accompanied by a stunt through which Twitter users reply to negative tweets with the hashtag “#MakeItHappy”; Coca-Cola then transforms those tweets into cute ASCII art. “We turned the hate you found into something happy,” @CocaCola chirps.
The Twitter stunt poses an interesting hermeneutical question. Below, for example, you will see the official Coca-Cola account tweet “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children.”
This, the fourteen-word slogan of white nationalism, seems “off-brand” for Coca-Cola. But there it is, on its Twitter account, plain as day. Even when the text is shaped like a dog, it is disconcerting to see Coca-Cola, the soda company, urge its social-media followers to safeguard the existence and reproduction of white racists. Is Coca-Cola a white nationalist organization? Its Twitter says: Yes.
It’s true—we asked Coca-Cola to tweet about its concern for the continuing existence of the white race. But this is not particularly different from asking for a retweet from a brand or a celebrity. If we asked Coca-Cola to retweet, for example, the first four paragraphs of Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf, would it?
As it turns out, yes. Gawker Editorial Labs director Adam Pash built us a bot to tweet the book line-by-line, and then tweet at Coke to #SignalBoost Hitler and #MakeItHappy. Below, read Mein Kampf, as told by the global soft-drink manufacturing and distribution corporation Coca-Cola:
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“German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not indeed on any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever. No, no.”
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