How a troll McDonald's account fooled everybody, even McDonald's itself
No, a McDonald's social media person hasn't gone rogue.
A parody account pretending to be McDonald's Hong Kong raised alarm bells over the weekend after it started posting a series of strange tweets.
The account, which has now been suspended, quickly attracted attention.
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Tweeting with the handle @Mc_DonaldsHK, it managed to get by passing off as the real thing at first glance.
It first started tweeting in late-2016, with fairly innocuous tweets promoting different food items.
The account was not verified but was believed by many to be an official account, because it had been tagged by McDonald's verified account.
The account was later revealed to have been created as a parody by a few friends as a "joke".
One of the creators of the account, @xxmisogi, told Mashable that this was not the first parody account that he had set up.
But after realising that the official McDonald's account had tagged them, @xxmisogi said they "realised they put us in more power than they wanted to with this mistake, we just wanted to make stupid crude jokes."
They then decided to make the most of the situation.
"We all brainstormed for tweets, and I was honestly amazed to see so many people thinking it was real, and many people were DM-ing us asking if we were ok," he said.
But McDonalds quickly stepped in after finding out about the account and it was soon suspended, despite the fact that the group had changed their twitter handle to @NotMcDonaldsHK.
But other users on the internet are refusing to let the joke go.
A new account under the name @McDonaldsHongK took to Twitter on Monday to tweet the exactly same thing.
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Really?
@xxmisogi confirmed to Mashable that he and his friends were not behind the new parody account.
"After we got suspended, we decided to leave it alone because it was already dead to us."
UPDATE: Aug. 2, 2017, 1:40 p.m. SGT Mashable had earlier identified the creators of a new parody account as the same people behind the original @Mc_DonaldsHK account.
Yvette is a Viral Content Reporter at Mashable Asia. She was previously reporting for BBC's Singapore bureau and Channel NewsAsia.
