2. The United Airlines de-boarding controversy


Similarly, social media misinformation can also cause significant damage to corporations and their reputation. The case of David Dao, a Vietnamese-American passenger who was the victim of a United Airlines overbooking mistake underscores the sheer chaos of social media when it comes to various individuals and groups seeking to use events to shape narratives that may or may not damage brands.


Dao, who, along with four other passengers, was randomly selected to de-board an aircraſt following a ground-crew overbooking mistake that leſt United Airlines’ staff without transport to another flight they had to catch, refused to leave the flight and had to be forcibly removed by airport security staff.


Not only were these staff not properly identified as staff from the outset (which would have helped to clear up confusion) but conjecture drawn from Facebook comments led to an increasing number of social media users believing that UA had against all statistical probability selected four Asians to “randomly” be de- boarded. This baseless rumor picked up such steam that it eventually found its way to both the East Asian press, and the Chinese social media site Weibo, where it became the cause celebre of the next week and was cited as evidence of not just United Airlines incompetence and poor service-levels, but an apparent racial animus too.1


This was further compounded by comments from United Airlines CEO, Oscar Munoz, who stated that he felt his staff did nothing wrong – further inflaming tension and adding fuel to an already raging social media fire.


This incident perhaps above all others underscores a fundamental disconnect between upper management of an organization and their inability to read the collective mood of the internet at any given time. In the case of United, in spite of the fact a more sympathetic narrative about the events could have been craſted, they remained distant and it cost them significantly, both in terms of reputation and stock value.2


1 Video of United Airlines Passenger Creates Furor in China, Too, New York Times, April 11th 2017. 2 United Airlines Stock Drops $1.4bn Aſter Passenger-Removal Controversy, Fortune, April 11th 2017.


Page 6 | Crisis Comms & Social Media


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