Well, who could have seen this coming? After MSNBC landed in hot water for predicting a “right-wing” backlash against a Cheerios Super Bowl ad featuring a mixed-race family, a completely different ad inspired a “#BoycottCoke” Twitter hashtag pegged to Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl entry, a rousing rendition of “America the Beautiful.” What, you may ask, could be the problem with that? Let’s let some of the early adopters of the hashtag explain:
And then, there were the patriotic geniuses who thought that “America the Beautiful” was our National Anthem:
Within minutes, #BoycottCoke was a global trending topic, at which point it became a whole lot more meta, with people alternately critiquing and satirizing the hashtag, keeping it trending.
Here’s the Coke ad that started it all:
