Kit Kat Forced To Pull 'Pedophile' Mascot
"Drumroll please... Kit Kat is on Instagram," read a post on Kit Kat's Facebook fan page. With that, they posted their debut Instagram photo: a smiley drummer in a bear suit using two jumbo Kit Kat bars as drum sticks. Pretty harmless, right? Wrong.
Soon thereafter, comments began to pour in about how similar the bear mascot looked to "Pedobear," an Internet mascot for pedophilia used predominantly on image board sites like 4chan.
Kit Kat, owned by Nestlé, said it had no idea that the image was reminiscent of "Pedobear" — a figure used as visual shorthand on the Internet on sites or posts containing material that is inappropriate for minors.
"We had never heard of Pedobear," insisted a company spokeswoman. "We produced this photo — of a real guy in a bear suit — to launch Instagram through our Facebook."
Needless to say, the company pulled the image from the Web immediately.