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US Airways Tweets Out Porn Photo Not Once, But Twice

By Crystal Watanabe
Published on: 06:57 PST, Apr 15, 2014

Yesterday, US Airways tweeted out an extremely graphic NSFW photo in response to a customer complaint, causing the level of internet hilarity to rise to astonishing levels. Since then, the story of how US Airways tweeted out a porn photo of a woman shoving a model airplane into her nether regions to user @ElleRafter have been circulating, but Deadspin has screenshots of the same image being tweeted out to @ThatKATZkat as well.

Although US Airways has since formally apologized for the tweet, people are still getting a whole lot of amusement out of the affair.

US Airways is reportedly still investigating how the tweet managed to happen, though their brief explanation right now is that the image was sent to the American Airlines Twitter account earlier that day. Whoever is running the US Airways social media copied and flagged the image to report, but somehow the image managed to make it into the two tweet responses regarding customer service.

Since the TwitPic link is the same in both tweets, it’s reasonable to assume that the link was simply the last link in the US Airways social media clipboard, but it’s still rather alarming that it took the company nearly an hour to realize their mistake. Since their mistake, the company has not sent out any further tweets, a wise move considering the graphic nature of the image.

Airlines seem to be making the news a lot this week. US Airways partner American Airlines received a flurry of attention earlier this week when a teenager was arrested for making a terrorist threat joke on Twitter. Southwest Airlines public relations has had undoubtedly had a much better week, with a video of a hilarious flight attendant doing a comedy routine before the flight, going viral.

It’ll be interesting to watch how US Airways deals with the fallout from the tweet, which is arguably the most inappropriately graphic brand tweet in the history of social media. Should the US Airways social media employee be fired? If it was genuinely a mistake and measures are being taken to check things in the future, is it OK to keep that person on board or is this the type of damage that cannot be forgiven?

What do you think should happen in the aftermath of this US Airways embarrassment? Did you see the image and do you know of a way to unsee it?

[Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images]

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