With the upcoming ‘Joker’ movie already the subject of memes and an ominous warning by the US military about ‘incel’ violence, an internet prankster has tricked the movie’s social media account into tweeting some hardcore racism.

A week away from release, ‘Joker’ has already been ridiculed as a movie pitched at Dorito-dust-stained neckbeards and fedora-clad incels – ‘involuntary celibate’ men, mad at the world and doubly so at women. In fact, so typecast is the movie’s fan base that the US military warned soldiers on leave that screenings could be targeted for mass shootings by disgruntled virgins.

The movie’s marketing team walked straight into a PR nightmare on Friday, thanks to their automated Twitter account that retweets followers with a countdown to the October 4 release date. The account mentions the username of the fan it’s replying to – a weakness exploited by one foul-mouthed internet troll by the name of “@HATEN*****S1488.”

The account tweeted out a reminder to the user, whose handle is both a racist slur and a combination of numbers used by neo-Nazis. The Joker’s 100,000-plus followers on Twitter were thus treated to a personalized shoutout to an alleged supporter of Hitler. Worse, the offending tweet picked up 4.5 thousand likes and 2.7 thousand retweets before whoever runs the official account had the sense to delete it.

Commenters piled on to mock the mishap. “Of all joker’s tricks this is by far the worst,” wrote one. “JOKER HAS GONE TOO FAR,” another tweeted.

The account responsible for the fiasco was also soon deleted.

While obviously a prank of some internet troll, the incident doesn’t help to mitigate the fears of a possible “incel attack” that has been stoked by the media and further fueled by the US military. While the isolated online “club” of women-haters does in fact exist, the media have lumped it together with all the internet trolls and 4chan-dwellers as part of a vast, disaffected ‘alt-right’ underclass.

“Incel” rage was the motivation of the 22-year old man behind the 2014 Isla Vista massacre, Elliot Rodger, while the Parkland High School shooter Nikolas Cruz referenced Rodger before his 2018 murder spree.

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