Photo by Andrew Wiseman.

Photo by Andrew Wiseman.

If your apology video includes the line “I’m not some malicious, mean ISIS sympathizer, you know?”, it’s safe to say you’re probably not having a great week.

Michael Valor is the 23-year-old owner of Valor Media, a North Carolina-based digital agency that local burger chain Z-Burger had contracted to run its social media. Over the weekend, Z-Burger’s Twitter account posted an image depicting murdered journalist James Foley with a hamburger. Foley was an American journalist whose beheading by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014 was captured in a graphic video released by the terror group. The meme on Z-Burger’s account used an image from that video.

The tweet, first reported by Washingtonian, was deleted shortly thereafter, but screenshots live forever.

Z-Burger owner Peter Tabibian apologized on Saturday for the “post in very poor taste that was not approved by me before being uploaded … We support the DMV in many ways, and hope that our loyal customers can overlook an error in judgment by a contracted marketing agent, who failed to direct planned, non-professional ad content to my attention, before posting it.”

He added later that Z-Burger ended its relationship with Valor Media, and will provide both a formal apology to the Foley family and make a contribution to the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation.

Now Valor has released a series of videos explaining the mishap, absolving Z-Burger of any blame, asking the Foley family for forgiveness, and outlining how his company will better its practices in the future.

“We do really, really, really, really, really good work on social media, outside of this one occurrence,” Valor said in one of the videos, released Tuesday. This post “kinda just slipped through the cracks. … We had an influx of volume, an influx of work, that came on to us over the last two or three weeks. We pulled on a new art director to the staff and we put out 200 tweets a day, okay?”

But Valor says that the “art director, she’s a really good girl, you know? She’s a good person. She’s an art student and she’s never hurt a fly, you know what I mean?”

To prevent something like this from occurring, “every single post from this point forward is going to go through a senior account admin and my COO personally to make sure all the content going out is really good, okay, that we’re not offending anyone. “

Valor said that “my entire reputation, my entire 23 years of life—which is not that long, you know?—I try to be a good person, promote heroism, promote positivity, promote being active in the community. And I would never, ever, ever, ever cause harm onto anyone.”

Valor showed that vaunted positivity by noting that “this was good in a sense that it drew awareness to an issue that could be drawn to.” He’s already looking toward the future. “In 20 years, when I’m 43 years old, you know, my company is gonna be way better off because of this mistake and I know that’s at the expense of a lot of people and I’m very sorry about that, I’m very heartfelt about that. But in the end, I am very young, I am human, and I believe that you are, too.”

Filed Under: meme, valor media, z-burger,