Facebook Mistakenly Drags Random User into ‘Westworld’ Marketing Stunt

The second season of the western/sci-fi epic HBO show “Westworld” will be launching soon, and as part of its marketing campaign, Facebook was supposed to send its users to a chatbot that would be promoting the event. However, someone made a mistake and sent users to the Messenger account of a woman from Kentucky, putting her inbox at risk of blowing up.

The mistake occurred because the user, whose real name is Lisa West, used the title of “Westworld” as her brand name on the messaging platform. Facebook was sending users to messenger.com/t/westworld, TechCrunch reports, which is an easy enough assumption to make without taking into consideration that internet users are known to take pop culture titles and use those as their pseudonyms.

In any case, one of the first to spot the mistake was Matt Navarra, who tweeted about the error. He even predicted that the unsuspecting woman was about to get a major surprise when she opens her inbox today.

“Facebook Messenger about to destroy the inbox of a random women (sic) from Kentucky?” the tweet reads. “They sent this tweet about Westworld, but the link takes you to a regular FB user called Lisa… Not a Westworld bot?!”

“Oops!”

Fortunately, the mistake has since been corrected and the woman ended up receiving only a few messages. It could have been so much worse if the original tweet announcing the event had gotten more attention.

Speaking to Mashable, the user also denied being involved or having any interest in the show. She also revealed why she used “Westworld” as her brand moniker on Messenger.

"I do not and I have never watched it," she said. "My last name is West and we refer to our home as Westworld lol."

Facebook also released a statement with regards to the matter, apologizing for the mistake and explaining what had happened. "For a short time this morning, a tweet from the Messenger Twitter account incorrectly linked people to message an individual person, instead of the intended bot for Messenger. As soon as we became aware of the error, we immediately corrected it. We’re very sorry for any trouble or confusion this caused," the statement reads.