Columbus Day was October 14th this year. It’s a holiday that has quite the controversy surrounding it. While it’s modern form here in the states partially originates as an Italian-American heritage day, the timing and spirit of the day is still based on the historic event of Christopher Columbus “discovering” the “new world” for Europe.
As with much of history, the event has been quite softened over the years, with the mistreatment of native populations at the hands of Columbus, his crew, and others to follow him, being ignored. As a natural contrast, there’s now, seemingly more so than ever, thanks to the internet, an incredible backlash against any mention of the holiday by that name.
I’m not here to discuss the details of this in particular, however — only to set the stage and share, for those who don’t know, that there is a very strong movement against this holiday as it is.
Now, with Social media being the thing it is these days, and every company being on it, it’s natural for them to post celebrating holidays. Many companies, however, are aware of controversy surrounding some events and are smart enough to stay away from some.
This wasn’t the case for Corn Nuts. You may not be aware of them – they seem like a popular but kind of “in the background” snack, but they aren’t half bad at all. A nice product with a pretty amusing social media presence — at least on twitter.
Corn is intrinsically tied to the Americas. Corn Nuts is a corn based snack, and since Columbus “discovered” America, Corn Nuts took to making a tweet having fun with this idea.
My buddy Prince Watercress decided to reply to them on this, while also capturing said tweets in the form of screenshots, for archival sake. He did this in a predictive way, almost as a friendly caution to them, that “this isn’t a good idea.” Corn Nuts would then delete the first tweet, make a second tweet, then delete that one as well!
Again, the tweets themselves are harmless. It isn’t an issue of them being offensive innately, unless you’re a prude, maybe, but the fact that they address the subject at all was enough to set at least one person on a quick “education session,” shall we say.
Note the “Mr Pib” reference — these tweets were actually copied over from another reply Ego had made to RC Cola for their own Columbus Day tweets. He wasn’t playing around with this.
Corn Nuts would delete both tweets, but not before doing a little house cleaning of their own — by this, I mean blocking people.
Why they would go this route when they were in the wrong (in public perception) is beyond me. They deleted the tweets so they clearly wanted to hide bad PR, but why the block? It isn’t like anyone was intrinsically trying to harass them, they just wanted to set the record straight on the subject as it’s not one many people take lightly.
Instead of being like “our bad, sorry” and moving on, they proved the “Streisand effect” by trying to hide things, and be petty about it.
It’s interesting, to say the least. More hilarious than anything else, but also kind of sad, and shows just how weird social media is. The tweets didn’t stay up long, but it also didn’t take long for them to realize how bad this may have gone.
I’ve tried to find more related to this, but haven’t been able to — perhaps Watercress and Ego were the only ones to really nip at this, or maybe people deleted their tweets when Corn Nuts deleted theirs.
Either way, the more you think about this the more absurd a situation it really seems. That’s really all there is to this — some absurdly pathetic hilarity. You can’t even be mad at being blocked, all you can do is laugh because it’s such an over reaction.
NOTE: This is a re-post of an article published already on October 21st. It had to be deleted and re-published due to technical issues. We apologize for any annoyance this may have caused.