This month’s most popular mobile game may put slurs in the mouths of users without them knowing it.
Last night, Twitter user Christina Lu (a BuzzFeed employee) noticed some strange and offensive text in the rampant new mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Pictured above, it's an auto-generated greeting from another BuzzFeed employee, Ellie Hall. Users have no control over their auto-generated greetings to other users, though they can sync their auto-greeting to their last tweet. But Hall has never, ever, ever, tweeted anything remotely close to "Whats up ma nigga?"
The implication: One of the most popular games on the planet right now, which boasts at least hundreds of thousands of users, attributes racially charged language to people who are totally unaware.
Unacceptable, right? Yes and no.
Both Lu and Hall, it turns out, had been playing a very popular "hacked" version of the game which gives the player unlimited "cash" and "K-stars" (quantities that the game gives out piecemeal to encourage in-app spending). The "hack" isn't anything complicated; it just involves swapping out the user's current saved game for one widely available online.
It did raise the possibility, however, that the uploader of the hacked save file had doctored in-game greetings, including the "Whats up ma nigga" that Lu saw. The save file was uploaded to SiNfuL iPhone Forums by a user named BJorn_LuLszic, who has not responded to Facebook and Twitter messages.
To complicated matters, other users who have apparently not hacked the game (they don't have unlimited cash or K-stars), have also reported very strange auto-greetings:
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