Celebrity Uses Twitter to Shame Airline

Kevin Smith. Photo by: Nehrams2020 under a Creative Commons license

Celebrity film director Kevin Smith decided that a public shaming was in order, when Southwest Airlines threw him off a flight for being too fat. Smith immediately turned to Twitter, in order to spread the new of his ordeal on the American carrier; his story spread far and the response from his fans was furious. Smith tweeted about how a Southwest pilot decided to eject him from a flight after he had already occupied one of the seats, simply for being overweight. Smith was flying from Oakland to Burbank, but he was forced to leave the aircraft and wait for a later flight. Southwest does have a policy of requiring passengers who are unable to fold down both armrests due to their size to purchase an additional seat, allegedly in order to appease thinner travelers who are irritated if their travel mate encroaches on their personal space. But this explanation wasn’t good enough for Smith’s Twitter followers. His tweets on the subject attracted a staggering 1.64 million comments from other micro-bloggers.

Smith posted a long series of tweets, as part of a tirade against an airline which publicly humiliated him for being overweight and deemed his less than perfect body-mass index to be a “safety risk.” Smith used Twitter to muse loudly about whether the flight’s captain was justified in kicking him off the aircraft. Southwest Airlines, however, must have noticed that the situation was rapidly turning into a public relations catastrophe, so the carrier used Twitter to issue an apology and indicate that the firm’s vice president would personally contact Smith to assure him that such a situation would never repeat itself.

But the Twitter apology hasn’t appeased the irate director. Smith has indicated that he would use a podcast to talk about his experience at the hands of Southwest’s “PR-challenged, fatty-haters.”