Bud Light Deletes Tweet Suggesting You Randomly Pinch People For St. Patrick’s Day

Today is the day some people celebrate the legacy of St. Patrick by wearing green, wearing shamrock antennae, and — if you’re a drunken, mannerless troglodyte — randomly walk around pinching people who didn’t wear green.

The whole pinching thing is an unfortunate “tradition” that many critics say is just another form of drunken harassment against women. It’s the kind of behavior that probably shouldn’t be encouraged by a multibillion-dollar beverage company with a lot to lose if it’s sued for suggesting that people get drunk and pinch people on the street.

And yet some marketing automaton in the social media cloning center at Anheuser-Busch InBev got the great idea this morning to post a Tweet declaring “On #StPatricksDay you can pinch people who don’t wear green. You can also pinch people who aren’t #UpForWhatever.”

Bud Light’s Tweet and use of the #upforwhatever hashtag resulted in some folks creating their own hashtags in response, like #upforlitigation and #UpForThingsIExplicitlyConsentTo

Amazingly, it took two hours for Bud Light to realize that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to tell 127,000 Twitter followers that it’s alright to pinch people because it’s March 17.

In response to the backlash, Bud Light issued a statement saying it never meant to encourage that drunk a-holes assault women in public.

“We understand some people misunderstood our St. Patrick’s Day post and apologize to anyone who was offended,” reads the statement to Mashable. “We would never condone disrespectful behavior and our intention was only to playfully celebrate the holiday.”

by Chris Morran via Consumerist