TWITTER HAS APOLOGISED to Manchester United defender Phil Jones for mocking him on its official UK account.
The social media network says “being the target of online abuse is not easy to deal with” on a dedicated help centre page about coping and reporting abuse.
Yet on Tuesday it engaged in such behaviour when taking aim at the centre-back, with its verified @TwitterUK account posting: “Name a better footballer than Phil Jones”.
United are understood to have complained to Twitter about the subsequently deleted post, with the social network apologising to both club and player.
England international Jones has endured a tough season and missed out on the Europa League finals squad with an ankle injury.
He last featured for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s team in January’s FA Cup fourth round win at Tranmere, netting the fourth goal in a 6-0 romp.
A Twitter spokesperson said: “Our aim was to showcase our new product feature, conversation controls, which allows you to select who can reply to a Tweet.
“It was not our intention to cause upset and once we realised our mistake, we immediately deleted the Tweet.”
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Classy alright
Jones is brutal but he doesn’t deserve to be ridiculed, like I’ve just ridiculed him
@Darren Lambe: many epl medals have you got?
@Pauly Kells: Zero, sorry if I offended you petal
@Darren Lambe: Zero…… best leave the comments to the medal winners wee man!
@T Dawg: oh christ!
@Darren Lambe: gwan Daz, ask him how medals he has
@my name: not sure there is many epl medals floating about on the 42 , shut it down!
@my name: Jones has more epl medals than your mate stevie g all the same, yeah gwan ask him as in your words????
@Pauly Kells: you’re too quick off the mark Pauly, reread TDawgs comment there
@Darren Lambe: eff you Darren “no medals” lambe
@Colm Ducker: I have an intermediate champo medal if thats any use!
@Darren Lambe: that’ll have to do. I’ll accept that. Epic stuff man.
@Darren Lambe: worth 5 EPL medals that at least
An OG from Twitter, both have scored a few in their time it must be said.
So what conversation settings were on? Who was allowed to reply?