 "BCCI's #ThankYouSachin campaign attracts trolls")
Indian cricketing great Sachin Tendulkar is playing his 199th test match in Kolkata currently against the West Indies. It is also supposed to be his last series playing for the country. Of course, this is turning out to be a social media peg for most brands to piggy-back upon and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is not too far behind. However, India’s cricketing board’s Twitter activity seems to be seeing a bit of trouble by trolls.
The BCCI kicked off its #ThankYouSachin campaign on Wednesday, honouring one of the greatest cricketers of all time on Twitter. The idea of the ongoing campaign is simple enough – you tweet to the BCCI’s Twitter handle with an appreciative message for the retiring batsman, with the hashtag #ThankYouSachin. The BCCI would then tweet back to you with a digital autograph – or a digigraph – that bears the batsman’s autograph on a picture of him.
Whoops!
The technology picks up your display name on Twitter, rather than your handle, to impress upon the digigraph. In most cases it would be your first name. However, since Twitter has never insisted upon the usage of real names like Facebook has done, this activity has seen trolls have a field day on Twitter.
If you’re browsing through BCCI’s feed this morning, it will not be surprising to see cuss words dotting the timeline. Trolls are taking this chance to change their display name on Twitter to the choicest Hindi abuses to trick the digigraph’s technology to “abuse” them. The moment BCCI auto-tweets to them, they will instantly change their names back to their real ones, leaving behind tweets like these:
Advertising the digigraph is a great idea, but the filters need some work (Screengrab credits: Star Sports)
Of course, this is supposed to be a massive campaign for the BCCI, Indian cricket and even Twitter. The micro-blogging website even kicked off its India blog this week with its first post dedicated to the special hashtag honouring Tendulkar. “In recognition of the limitless joy that @sachin_rt has brought to our lives for nearly a quarter of a century, we couldn’t think of a more apt message with which to launch our India blog than #ThankYouSachin,” the blog by Rishi Jaitly, India Marketing Director at Twitter wrote.
With the BCCI advertising this new feature all over the web, on Twitter and on TV heavily, it is interesting to note that the digigraph’s filter to catch abusive posts isn’t working too well. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of automated tweets going out every minute from BCCI’s handle could also prove to be an issue as far as deleting the abusive tweets being sent out erroneously. Meanwhile, the day belongs to trolls who’ve been retweeting messages on the lines of “BCCIsucks, click here for you Sachin Tendulkar personalized digital autograph.”
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