Targeting Twitter.


A man takes pictures of “hate tweets”, a part of the art project “#HEYTWITTER” created by Shahak Shapira, outside Twitter office in Hamburg, Germany August 4, 2017 in this picture obtained from social media. Youtube via REUTERS.

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German-Israeli artist who accuses Twitter of failing to delete hate speech tweets has taken matters into his own hands – by stencilling the offending messages on the road in front of the company’s Hamburg headquarters.

A post on video-sharing site YouTube showed Shahak Shapira and fellow activists stencilling tweets saying “Germany needs a final solution to Islam” and “Let’s gas the Jews” – clear references to the Nazi regime’s World War Two genocide of Europe’s Jews. [youtu.be/jzMTBINlLFU]

Shapira said he had reported some 300 incidents of hate speech on Twitter but had received just nine responses from the company.

“If Twitter forces me to see these things, then they should have to see it as well,” he said in the video, posted on Monday, describing the comments as violations of the social network’s community guidelines.

A very clever idea! You can read more about this at Reuters.

Comments

  1. chigau (違う) says

    It would be nice if some of them paid attention.
    But They™ do not use that door.
    The chauffeur delivers them right next to the executive elevator.

  2. johnson catman says

    From the article:

    Twitter is now taking action on 10 times as many abusive accounts now compared to the same time last year, he added.

    Wow, Couldn’t they claim 100 or 1000 times as much since any number times zero is zero? (Just being snarky. I realize the number is non-zero, but at ten times, they probably are still way under-policing.)

  3. methuseus says

    I’m not up to date on German law, but I’m pretty sure this is protected artwork so nobody will be arrested. I’m hoping nobody will be arrested, of course, but plenty of places in the USA would insist on arresting people for perpetrating this “graffiti” (as the company would put it).

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