When the Germany-based satirical artist Shahak Shapira became concerned with the increasing hate comments online, he began to report hundreds of offensive posts to Facebook and Twitter. “The statements I reported weren’t just plain insults or jokes but absolutely serious threats of violence, homophobia or Holocaust denial,” he says in the video (above).
Although Facebook responded to his requests and deleted 80% of the hateful posts, his experience with Twitter was quite the opposite. Out of the 300 tweets that he had reported, he only received answers for nine over six months. “And each of them stated that there was no violation of Twitter’s rules and guidelines,” he says.
This was when he decided that perhaps the service needed a taste of its own medicine. “If Twitter forces me to see these things, then they’ll have to see them too,” he says. With the help of his friends, he picked 30 of the 300 tweets he had reported, turned them into stencils, headed to Hamburg and spray-painted them right outside Twitter’s office on the ground. “And tomorrow morning, when the Twitter people arrive at the office, they’ll have to look at all the beautiful tweets that their company loves to ignore to much.”
The act of protest, however, lead to a lukewarm response from Twitter. Some of the spray-painted tweets – the ones on the pavement right outside the office building – were cleaned up by the maintenance staff, while the rest remained. “...Which fits very well with Twitter’s policy of cleaning in front of their own doors and leaving the rest to be someone else’s problem,” says a frustrated Shapira.
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