The New York Police Department just got a, shall we say, brutal lesson in social media.
A little before 3pm New York time this afternoon, the NYPD tweeted out a seemingly innocuous three sentences, asking people to share photos taken with NYPD members and include the hashtag #myNYPD.
The good news is that that hashtag is now trending. The bad news is that it’s trending.
While a few people shared the sorts of pictures the NYPD was hoping for, the thousands who think much less highly of the department—including the Occupy Wall Street movement—responded with cheeky, stark, and even gory photos of apparent police brutality.
As many pointed out, the NYPD should really have learned a thing or two from JP Morgan, which brought on a similar deluge of abuse last November when it invited people to send questions for a live Q&A with a bank executive using the hashtag #AskJPM:
And unfortunately, #myNYPD is now a repository of everything the police department does not want people to remember about it: