Earlier in the week, a woman was shocked when the US Airways’ Twitter account sent her an X-rated image. Now, US Airways says it won’t fire the employee who re-tweeted the image because it was done by “mistake.”
The image was affixed to a tweet on the official US Airways account asking a customer to submit a review of her flight. But the image, which originally came from a tweeter named ARTxDEALER, was not the type of image a company should send its customers.
The X-rated image was of a woman on her back with the nose of a 747 airliner model jammed between her legs. It was taken down once US Airways realized what had happened.
As soon as the incident came to light, the airline released a statement:
We apologize for the inappropriate image we recently shared in a Twitter response. Our investigation has determined that the image was initially posted to our Twitter feed by another user. We captured the tweet to flag it as inappropriate. Unfortunately the image was inadvertently included in a response to a customer. We immediately realized the error and removed our tweet. We deeply regret the mistake and we are currently reviewing our processes to prevent such errors in the future.
The airline is standing by its employee. US Airways reported that the worker did not intentionally tweet the image, but was merely trying to flag the image as inappropriate. The third party image was “inadvertently included” in the live Twitter stream, the airline said.
“It was an honest mistake. It was in an attempt to flag the tweet as inappropriate,” said Airways spokesman Matt Miller. It was then accidentally added to a later tweet, he further explained.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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