KFC Apologizes for Linking Chicken Promotion to Kristallnacht

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An automated push notification sent in error by KFC Germany conflated the notorious 1938 pogrom and “tender cheese with crispy chicken.”

KFC’s German branch has apologized for seeming to encourage its customers to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht — the notorious Nazi pogrom against Jews — by eating chicken, saying that a promotional message was sent in error as a result of an automated push notification. The pogrom that began on Nov. 9, 1938, is known as the night of broken glass, and is widely commemorated as the start of the Holocaust. It was a coordinated assault on German Jews and their homes, businesses and synagogues.

On Wednesday, KFC Germany sent a message to users of its app with the title “Anniversary of the Reich’s pogrom night,” according to reports in the German news media and screen shots of the promotion that circulated widely on Twitter. The message invited customers to enjoy “tender cheese with crispy chicken.”

KFC Germany quickly followed up with an apology within the app for having sent what it called an “incorrect” and “inappropriate” message. But criticism was swift and merciless. “How wrong can you get on Kristallnacht @KFCDeutschland,” Dalia Grinfeld, the associate director for European affairs at the Anti-Defamation League, wrote on Twitter. “Shame on you!” KFC Germany apologized again in a statement to news outlets, saying that its “obviously wrong, insensitive and unacceptable” message about Kristallnacht resulted from an automated push notification that had been sent by accident.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/business/kfc-germany-kristallnacht-chicken.html

[GreenWave]

1. That was supposed to be for the GOP only branch, the KKKFC.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

2. Likely somebody at Corporate bought a list of 'observances by locale' for probably the whole world

From some vendor.

And then nobody with the sufficient amount of cultural awareness went through and vetted/removed (or at least 'flagged to never use') the observances with a deeply negative connotation within that locale. You'd need a lot of people for that, it would cost money. Equivalent things in the USA would be April 4, or September 11.

Then they set up an automated bot system to push out promotional notifications using that calendar.

That was a serious IT fuckup, but highly doubtful it was 'intentional' by anyone in the chain of people involved, just a function of being cheap and/or bad management.

That's my best guest, as someone who's worked on teams creating these bots, and being responsible for the database part of the system.

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6. Some jobs should not be automated.

Or at least there should be a human review before something is sent out.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

7. That job can totally be automated ... but you need humans to vet the data that will shoved into the

system automatically over time ... BEFORE you start running it.

My strong bet would be ... they failed to do that. Someone in charge thought 'well it's an observance, it's in this list, it must be a positive thing, we'll do automated yearly promos on all these'. Not realizing that observances are not necessarily 'positive' in nature.

That was a bad call.

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8. Yeah, they should probably take Hitler's birthday out of the data too.

[DFW]

3. An accident??

I thought the whole thing had been made up. We never saw anything of the sort, so if it made it into the public domain at all, it sure never made any ripples in our area.

SOMEONE had to have thought this up, and someone had to have briefly approved. They need to start working for Kentucky Roasted Vulture, and in the janitorial department, auxiliary.

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4. This happened in Germany only.

That makes it even worse.

[hatrack]

5. And be sure to try the zesty flavor of our new Spicy Sobibor Wings!!!!