It wasn't just Iran: Habitat appeared to simply pick its hashtags off the trending topics list last week, with other tags including #mms #Apple and #Poh (a former Australian Masterchef contestant). From what we can tell, the blog DigitalTip was the first to pick up on the spam on Sunday. Today that blog received an apology from Habitat:
I know people have been waiting for a response tweet from us; we are treating this very seriously and wanted to offer a longer message.
We have been reading everyone’s comments carefully and would like to make a very sincere apology to any Twitter users who were offended.
The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused. This is totally against our communications strategy. We never sought to abuse Twitter, have removed the content and will ensure this does not happen again.
It has been really valuable to hear how users would like us to use Twitter and we are determined to do better for the Twitter community.
Claire
Habitat Head Office
London