Treyarch and Activision Apologize for Fake Reports of Terrorism on Official Call of Duty Twitter

Last week the official Call of Duty Twitter account decided to run a simple marketing campaign for their upcoming game, Black Ops 3. The campaign was not received well, however, and now someone has reached out from Treyarch to apologize for the events.

3

Last week the official Call of Duty Twitter account decided to run a simple marketing campaign for their upcoming game, Black Ops 3. The campaign was not received well, however, and now someone has reached out from Treyarch to apologize for the events.

Last Tuesday the official Call of Duty account was renamed to “Current Events Aggregate”. Shortly after the name change the account began to tweet out articles on fashion, movies, and “breaking news” about a terrorist attack in Singapore. You can check out the tweets below, however, the name has since been changed over to reflect the official account once more.

The news tweets ended around 2:30 that day, however, it wasn’t until several hours later that a tweet was sent out clarifying the situation.

No matter how clear they thought it was though, the internet and several news sites found the mini-campaign to be in poor taste, and recently Treyarch’s Jason Blundell reached out to IGN to apologize for the event.

“Here’s my view – and again, I’m a simple director and not involved in the marketing at all," he began by stressing. "However, it was absolutely not done for any kind of attention in any way. It was not done maliciously, or as any kind of scare tactic. I personally am very sorry for anyone who looked at it and got the wrong idea because it genuinely wasn’t meant that way.

"It was done on our channel, and it was to talk about the fiction of the world. I think we were as shocked as everybody else when it started blowing up, because essentially we were teeing up ready for a story beat. So again, very sorry for anyone who took it that way. It wasn’t meant that way at all – it was supposed to just be getting ready for a campaign element."

While it might not have been meant that way, the campaign could have had tougher fallout. We suppose the good news here is that it didn’t.

Guides Editor

Joshua holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and has been exploring the world of video games for as long as he can remember. He enjoys everything from large-scale RPGs to small, bite-size indie gems and everything in between.

From The Chatty
Hello, Meet Lola