A Washington, DC-based burger chain is under fire for a tasteless tweet of a patty alongside a photo of journalist James Foley, moments before he was executed by ISIS militants.
The unconscionable post came Saturday on Z-Burger’s Twitter page showing a still from Foley’s execution video alongside the superimposed burger.
Foley, a freelance war correspondent, was killed in 2014 in Syria after being abducted two years earlier.
Z-Burger was immediately roasted for tweeting the photo, which was captioned: “When you say you want a burger and someone says okay lets hit McDonalds” and had “You disgrace me” written underneath.
“What’s funny about being killed in terms of marketing?” fumed Gene Policinski, president of the Newseum’s Freedom Forum Institute, WUSA 9 reported. “Really, how could you be that unaware?”
The post was deleted but captured in screenshots.
Z-Burger owner Peter Tabibian fired off several apologies on Twitter and said the post wasn’t approved by him before it was uploaded to the chain’s account.
“I have taken immediate steps to ensure that this never happens again, and our customers have my promise to ensure that established controls over the placement of amateur promotional posts on our Twitter page are more closely followed, immediately,” he wrote.
Z-Burger blamed the debacle on its outside social media contractor, Valor Media.
“Valor Media has accepted responsibility, apologized to us, and has assured us that their error would never be repeated, but the damage is already done,” the burger shop wrote.
Valor Media’s 23-year-old founder, Michael Valor, reiterated in a series of videos that Z-Burger had nothing to do with the offensive tweet.
“We had an influx of volume, an influx of work that came onto us over the last two or three weeks, we pulled on a new art director onto the staff and we put out 200 tweets a day,” he said. “That being said, this is no excuse for the oversight.”
Valor vowed all posts in the future would first be vetted by a “senior account admin” and “my COO personally.”
