On Sunday, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz sent a letter to all employees announcing that the company was "developing plans to hire 10,000 [refugees] over five years."
When the letter was released, it immediately triggered protests among right-wing social media users. Many announced they would be boycotting Starbucks over its perceived opposition to President Trump's travel ban.
Shut them down #BoycottStarbucks Please share! RT
Which also inspired counter-protests and memes on Twitter. Like this one.
racists: #BoycottStarbucks me:
Or this one.
me: i don't really like starbucks starbucks: promises 10k jobs for refugees me:
Noticing anything weird about those photos?
It's the same dude in all of them.
That's because they're all from a blog post by a well-known Japanese blogger named Mr. Sato. He writes for a website called Rocket News 24.
In 2015, Sato and the Rocket News 24 team decided to take advantage of a crazy thing Starbucks Japan was offering: The Big Logo Mug.
Sato bought one and decided to try to get someone at Starbucks to fill it.
Yeah, it didn't go well.
Unfortunately, they had to just get a regular cup of coffee and dump it in their humungous mug.
But Sato persevered and successfully drank from his Big Logo Mug...sorta...
Sato told BuzzFeed News he received a DM from a friend overseas who said his photo was going viral.
At first, Sato was really confused. He was worried that his photos were going viral for a bad reason.
"I misunderstood it, I was pretty upset," he said. "Were my photos being used in something bad?"
Sato saw the #BoycottStarbucks hashtag and was really confused. He figured he was part of some kind of protest against Starbucks. He said he also didn't understand what the "Me:" in the tweet meant. But after someone explained it he thought it was pretty funny.
"I understood that it was used in a very positive way," he said.
Sato then reached out to the Twitter user who posted the photos and thanked him, and the two agreed to grab coffee some time.
