11 Greatest Twitter Fails Of 2014 Prove Things Can Still Go Really, Really Wrong Online

The Worst Twitter Fails Of 2014

Still fresh in the memory is Russell Brand's questionable decision to tweet out the mobile number and email address of a Daily Mail journalist who he said was bothering his family, to his 8.7 million followers. Brand apologised, and journalist Neil Sears no doubt changed his number.

More of a name fail than a Twitter fail. As the deadly Ebola virus hit the headlines, former Birmingham City footballer Dele Adebola was forced to point out that he did not ever have the disease, after a string of online jokes about his name.

In tweeting a picture of what was inside an Afghanistan relief worker's backpack, the Guardian's development network unwittingly posted a picture of a "flesh light" sex toy. The picture was later deleted.

Pop star Rita Ora set herself up for a fall by saying that if her tweet got 100,000 retweets she'd release her new single early. She didn't - far from it, at only around 1,000. Needless to say the tweet hastily disappeared and she lamely claimed her Twitter account had been hacked.

The beleaguered airline suffered double tragedy after over 500 people died in two disasters: Flight MH370 disappeared and Flight MH17 was shot down. In November it tweeted 'Want to go somewhere but don't know where?' for a marketing campaign before removing the message after accusations that it was insensitive to the fact that one of its own planes is missing. The carrier seemed to have learnt nothing after being slammed for launching a "bucket list" promotional campaign two months before, asking people where they wanted to go before they died.

Amazingly, US Airways wasn't hacked when it tweeted an image of a toy plane in a woman's vagina from its account. The infamous 'planegina' post was apparently the result of someone - who wasn't fired - meaning to flag the rude image as inappropriate, but instead tweeted it to over 400,000 followers. Nice one.

Pretty ironic its was the CFO of Twitter that made this slip-up: Anthony Noto meant to send a private suggesting he had plans to buy another company - but accidentally broadcast "we should buy them" to some 9,000 followers.

Cricket legend Sir Ian Botham appeared to post a picture of a penis on Twitter, prompting gleeful jokes about stumps, balls and more from observers. He confirmed he'd been hacked, and deleted the unsavory image (covered here with a tasteful ball).

She could have been a victim of vicious auto-correcting, but whatever the reason, Naomi Campbell confused the Twittersphere by congratulating a tropical disease for winning a Nobel Prize - rather than Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai.

Comedian Bill Cosby posted a link to a meme-generator on his and playfully told followers to "Go ahead, meme me!" But things went very wrong when some users created memes referencing rape allegations brought against the 77-year-old. The tweet has since been deleted.

The Labour MP lost her job over a tweet with a single image and three words, after her post showing a white van outside a house displaying an England flag was seen as promoting snobbery towards working class people.

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