The New England Patriots have issued a public apology after the team's official Twitter account sent out a thank you tweet to a Patriots "fan" using a racist Twitter handle.
The team was holding a promotion that was meant to celebrate the Patriots becoming the first team to reach 1,000,000 followers on Twitter.
Per an Associated Press report, "the team asked fans to retweet a message about the achievement. For each fan who did so, an automated system generated a message that included an image of a jersey with that person's Twitter handle on it."
When the user with the racist Twitter handle retweeted the message, an automated system generated an image of a Patriots jersey with the racist handle on the back of it.
The tweet was quickly deleted and the team apologized for the slip-up, saying that the filtering system had failed. A team spokeperson declined any additional comment on Friday.
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