A Twitter user had his account suspended about two weeks after he ‘sexually abused’ Tony the Tiger on the social media site.
Kellogg’s official Tony the Tiger account tweeted a gif of milk being poured into a bowl of Frosted Flakes with a box of the cereal behind it on August 7.
The tweet said: ‘Sure, Cinnamon Frosted Flakes look GR-R-REAT. And that tiger on the box doesn’t look half bad either. #blushing #cinnamongraph’.
Later that day, Alex Boivin, 30, saw the promoted tweet and responded by saying: ‘I’d f*** that tiger’.
About two weeks later, he was notified that his Twitter account would be suspended for a week.
Kellogg’s official Tony the Tiger account tweeted a gif of milk being poured into a bowl of Frosted Flakes with a box of the cereal behind it on August 7 (pictured). Twitter user Alex Boivin, 30, saw the promoted tweet in his feed and responded by saying: ‘I’d f*** that tiger’
About two weeks later, Boivin was notified that his Twitter account would be suspended for a week because of his tweet (pictured)
The social media site notified him of the suspension by saying he had violated the site’s rules and he wouldn’t be able to tweet, retweet or like anything on Twitter.
He is, however, allowed to send direct messages.
‘There was about a two-week gap from the tweet to it getting suspended, which seems weird because isn’t someone at the Kellogg’s social media team getting notifications of this? Or does the Twitter team just take that long to get to these things?’ Boivin told BuzzFeed News.
‘The Tony tweet popped into my feed as a promoted tweet, I have a special loathing of these things.
‘If you give me an opportunity to interact with a #brand that’s popping into my timeline without my consent, I’m gonna get weird. I thought “I’d f*** that tiger” would be a funny joke and tweeted it without giving it a second thought.
‘Just the idea of sexualizing this corporate cereal mascot struck me as a suitably bizarre thing to share with the sort of people who like to interact with promoted tweets from multi-billion-dollar food processing conglomerates.’
‘There was about a two-week gap from the tweet to it getting suspended, which seems weird because isn’t someone at the Kellogg’s social media team getting notifications of this? Or does the Twitter team just take that long to get to these things?’ Boivin said
The social media site notified him of the suspension by saying he had violated the site’s rules and he wouldn’t be able to tweet, retweet or like anything on Twitter. He is, however, allowed to send direct messages
Boivin said he didn’t know that tweeting sexual messages at Tony the Tiger was common among members of the ‘furry fandom’, however, his former roommate tweeted Wednesday that Boivin is a ‘noted furry’
However, it’s actually not all that uncommon for people to tweet sexually explicit things to the Tony the Tiger account.
Members of the ‘furry fandom’ – a community of people interested in fictional anthropomorphic animal characters – have been tweeting sexual messages at Tony the Tiger since at least last year, even coming to the point where the Kellogg’s social media team blocked a group of ‘furries’ last January.
‘America has this back-a**-wards Calvinist streak where calling for the expulsion and genocide of non-white races is just a difference of opinion,’ Boivin said.
‘But making a sex joke at a corporate mascot who paid money to advertise to you is cause for censure.’
Boivin told BuzzFeed he didn’t know that tweeting sexual messages at Tony the Tiger was common among furries.
‘I’m happy for them to be doing their thing, it’s just not for me. But I guess that this whole episode just proves that we have more in common than we may ever know.’
However, Boivin’s former roommmate tweeted Wednesday that Boivin is a ‘noted furry’.
Members of the ‘furry fandom’ – a community of people interested in fictional anthropomorphic animal characters – have been tweeting sexual messages at Tony the Tiger since at least last year, even coming to the point where the Kellogg’s social media team blocked a group of ‘furries’ last January
