A fake Twitter account claiming to represent restaurants in Honk Kong escaped detection by the fast-food giant's central offices for nearly a year, but its luck finally ran out last week.
@Mc_DonaldsHK first appeared on Twitter in October of 2016, and intermittently posted innocuous promotional material for the next nine months.
There was no reason to notice anything amiss.
Gizmodo even has screenshots of the official @McDonaldsCorp account tweeting to @Mc_DonaldsHK in late May. The Honk Kong account’s reply was weird and vulgar (and since deleted), but nobody at McDonald's seems to have noticed the prankster's mask slipping, and @Mc_DonaldsHK remained intact.
Then, last week, things suddenly unravelled. “where is my son they took my son,” reads one tweet published July 29. “i want to quit she left me,” reads another.
Yesterday, the rogue McDonald's account's luck seems to have run out. @Mc_DonaldsHK posted a screenshot of a Twitter notification that it had been "reported for impersonation." The account's handle has since been changed to @notMcDonaldsHK, and it is now clearly marked as parody to comply with Twitter's rules.
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In a statement to Gizmodo, McDonald's confirmed that the account was an impersonator, not a marketing stunt, and that the company was moving to shut the account down. There doesn’t seem to be an official Honk Kong McDonald’s Twitter account, likely because Twitter is officially blocked in China.