On Tuesday, the ad team at Cheerios posted a new commercial entitled, “Just Checking” to YouTube that featured an adorable little girl asking her mother if it’s true that Cheerios are good for your heart. The mother reads to her from the box that Cheerios are indeed “Heart Healthy” and the little girl is happy because she just poured a box of the cereal all over her dad’s chest as he was napping on the couch. It’s a sweet Cheerios commercial that gets a point across while perhaps making people smile. So naturally, it inspired YouTube trolls to spew racial hate.
You see, in this commercial, the mother is white and the father is black, and that didn’t sit too well with the legions of anonymous bottom-feeders that believe that posting hateful messages on YouTube qualifies as a life. Fortunately, Cheerios disabled the comments on the video, so I couldn’t even see some of the worst comments. But Ad Week described it as such:
And then you have the YouTube comments section, which predictably has devolved into an endless flame war, with references to Nazis, “troglodytes” and “racial genocide.”
Ad Week also points out that the video made the front page of Reddit, and Business Insider reported that “it received a plethora of racists remarks” there as well. I read some of the 900+ comments on that thread, and while I saw plenty of tongue-in-cheek racist jokes – “should be for multi-grain Cheerios” – and something about Stone Cold Steve Austin and a dolphin that made me chuckle, I thought most people involved in that thread were more concerned with the corporate infiltration of the Valhalla known as Reddit’s front page.
Maybe the “racist remarks” were just misconstrued, like this one that I think is directed at an ad making it to Reddit’s front page:
Nice try Cheerios ad team! I’m never eating Cheerios again! Good day sir!!!
Either way, YouTube just needs to eliminate comments on all videos, so all of the racist cowards can redirect their energy back to loathing their own worthless existences.