Activist Spray Paints Offensive Tweets Outside Twitter Office

One angry Twitter user feels that the company is not doing enough to protect against violent and intolerant Tweets on social media, so he took to the streets.

According to New Now Next,  Shahak Shapira, a German-Israeli activist, has reported over 300 offensive Tweets, but only received responses about nine of them. The Tweets weren’t racist jokes or off-kilter slurs that would spark a social media debate – they were all-out calls to violence. Some of them included “Let’s gas some Jews together” and calls for violence against Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ individuals and women. In other words, actual hate speech.

“[They] weren’t just plain insults or jokes,” Shapira explains, “but absolutely serious threats of violence. Homophobia, xenophobia, Holocaust denial. Things no one should say and no one should read.”

Shapira then took the streets to protest by stenciling the hate speech in front of Twitter’s office building. He chose 30 of the offensive Tweets to make his point, and included the Twitter birdy logo and the users’ Twitter handles.

After that, he brought the problem back to social media, using #HeyTwitter as a hashtag to share his work online. Shapira hopes that seeing these hateful words on a larger-than-life scale will help encourage the powers that be at the social media site to take action against account holders.

Cover image courtesy of Shahak Shapira on Facebook