It’s every Facebook administrator’s nightmare: A computer glitch completely ruins a perfectly composed post.
The Huffington Post ran into this very issue Monday after posting about a Mexican journalist found dead — and discovering the post was accompanied by a large photo of a beaming Taylor Swift.
The Huffington Post said it didn’t intentionally post a photo of Taylor Swift on the story of a Mexican journalists found dead.
The post linked to a story by the Associated Press, which reported that the body of journalist Moises Sanchez was “found in Eastern Mexico.” Sanchez had been “abducted by armed men three weeks ago,” the AP reported.
The article page itself, published on HuffPost Media, did not have a feature photo of Swift. It showed a photo of protests in Mexico against Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Huffington Post spokeswoman Lena Auerbuch said the Swift photo placement next to the Facebook post about the slain journalist story was not deliberate. It appeared on the story as a result of a “technical glitch/issue,” and “should be resolved now” she said.
“It has to do with how our server communicates with Facebook’s server,” she wrote in an email to AJR.
Auerbuch said in a follow-up phone interview that the photo was “automatically pulled because it appeared somewhere on The Huffington Post.”
She declined to make a member of The Huffington Posts’ Facebook team available for an interview with AJR regarding further questions on the technical reasons behind the glitch.
The slip-up triggered a wave of comments on the HuffPost Media Facebook page from users joking whether Taylor Swift was a suspect in the death of the journalist.
“Shame on you Tswift,” wrote one user.
Others implored The Huffington Post to “get it together.”
Twitter users also poked fun at Swift photo.
Whaaaaaatttt!?!? @HuffingtonPost just killed @taylorswift13 pic.twitter.com/hy82RDxHqK
— Karnika Kohli (@KarnikaKohli) January 26, 2015
