'Westworld' promotion on Facebook mistakenly sends you to a regular woman's DMs
UPDATE: May 29, 2018, 11:47 a.m. EDT The original tweet has been deleted and Messenger released a statement apologizing for the mistake.
Somebody over at Facebook's Messenger didn't double check their links.
As a promotion for the HBO show Westworld, the official Twitter account for Messenger tweeted out a link that was intended to direct you to talk to a bot and partake in a little promotional game/conversation with a host from the show. Instead of that, though, the link mistakenly takes you to the account of an actual real woman named Lisa.
Here's a screenshot of the original tweet, which has since been deleted:
The link in that tweet sends you right to the DMs of Lisa McKinley West, a woman from Kentucky who happened to take the custom URL "westworld" for her Facebook page long before Westworld hit HBO. The link that Messenger should've tweeted is this: m.me/westworldHBO.
Luckily the tweet from Messenger didn't get too much action, only receiving a couple of likes and one retweet in the span of an hour. Nevertheless, West received a few messages from fans who were no-doubt hoping to get a clue about next week's episode.
Asked if she had any connection at all to the show, West unequivocally denied any involvement.
"I do not and I have never watched it," she said in a message to this reporter. "My last name is West and we refer to our home as Westworld lol."
So if you're looking to chat about Westworld, take your messages elsewhere.
Over an hour after the tweet was sent out and almost an hour after someone replied saying Messenger had the wrong link, the tweet still stood, uncorrected.
About an hour after this story published, a spokesperson for Facebook reached out with a statement: "For a short time this morning, a tweet from the Messenger Twitter account incorrectly linked people to message an individual person, instead of the intended bot for Messenger. As soon as we became aware of the error, we immediately corrected it. We’re very sorry for any trouble or confusion this caused."
Topics Facebook HBO Social Media
