PepsiCo cites ‘unintentional activity’ for Twitter slam of Tucker Carlson

PepsiCo is blaming an allegedly unauthorized use of the Twitter channel for its Pepsi brand for criticism of Fox News talk show Tucker Carlson.

On Friday evening, the Pepsi Twitter channel retweeted a post by Nikki McCann Ramirez, a researcher at Media Matters for America, that called Carlson to task for repeatedly mispronouncing the first name of U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris.

“Tucker Carlson loses it when a guest corrects his pronunciation of Kamala Harris”™s name,” said Ramirez”™s tweet, which included a video of Carlson referring to the presumptive Democratic Party vice presidential nominee as “Carmela.” The Pepsi Twitter channel, which has approximately 3 million followers, retweeted the post without comment, but that retweet was deleted on Saturday afternoon.

PepsiCo issued a statement to the news site Mediaite that explained the retweet was not officially sanctioned by the Purchase-headquartered company.

“Recently, there was unusual and unintentional activity from the Pepsi brand Twitter account. It has since been removed,” the statement said. “We are investigating this occurrence and have implemented additional back-end security measures.”

Carlson did not publicly comment on the PepsiCo retweet.