In the annals of social media goatfucking, few have pounded it quite as hard as whoever is currently at the helm of Burger King's UK twitter account. After posting "Women belong in the kitchen" they are now tweeting through it, desperately reiterating missing context and insisting that the glib missive was part of an ironic call for empowerment.
Burger King UK appears much angrier at critics than it is at the sexists delightedly retweeting and praising them, however, and it isn't helping.
Taken alone, it looks a lot like Schrodinger's Asshole, a provocative message posted by a troll who "decides whether or not they're full of shit by the reactions of those around them." While Burger King UK at least strategically favors women's rights and agency, its investment in these goals is corporate and it's depressingly easy to imagine it changing hats (crowns?) with the wind.
But even with the best of intentions, the tweet is an obvious mistake. The context that makes it clever (i.e. the tweets following it adding 'If they want to, of course… We're on a mission to change the gender ratio in the restaurant industry') is instantly stripped from it by the design of Twitter itself. This phenomenon is Social Media 101 and it's amazing to see such a big account dive so hard into context collapse.
Finally, consider Popehat's rule: an ironic goatfucker is still a goatfucker.
