Don’t get too excited, this was an advertising campaign that came out in 2009 when Facebook was still second to Myspace (my oh my, how times have changed). Burger King launched the slogan, “You like your friends, but you love the Whopper.” They then encouraged Facebookers to unfriend 10 people on their friends list, and once they did, they’d receive a coupon for a free Whopper.
Easy peasy, right? Nobody knows when I unfriend them! Not so fast, burger lover. BK wasn’t playing that nice. When someone was unfriended to get the Whopper, the “friend” (who probably wasn’t a real friend anyway) would receive a message saying that they had been sacrificed for a burger. Nice.
Burger King shut down the campaign after concerns that the not-so-friendly “sacrifice” messages were an invasion of privacy. However, before the plug was pulled, around 234,000 Facebookers had been defriended, resulting in 23,000 coupons for free Whoppers.