Artist paints hate tweets at Twitter Inc’s office
Employees heading to work at Twitter’s offices in Hamburg last week were greeted by a series of racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs sprayed in chalk outside their front door.
“Retweet if you hate Muslims,” one read in English. Others, written in German, said that the country “needs a final solution again for Islam” and “Let’s gas some Jews together again.”
The graffiti that appeared on Friday was the work of an Israeli-German artist, Shahak Shapira, who said he took the slurs from hundreds of actual posts he had flagged to Twitter over six months, only to see a majority of them remain on the platform.
“I’ve reported more than 300 tweets to Twitter,” Shapira said in an online video.
“For that, I received only nine answers over the last six months, each of them stating there was no violation of Twitter’s rules.”
Unlike their digital inspiration, many messages sprayed on the sidewalk were removed by a street cleaner hours after Shapira painted them. Others remained visible awhile longer.
Shapira’s protest comes less than two months before a new Germany law comes into effect, under which social media companies could face huge fines if they do not remove hate speech from their platforms in a timely fashion.
Twitter said in the past year, it took action against 10 times as many abusive accounts as it had the year before. It didn’t say how many accounts had been addressed and declined to comment on Shapira’s protest.
This is not the first time Shapira has sought to draw attention to hateful messages on social media. This year, his Yolocaust project, which combined selfies taken by people at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial with images from Nazi extermination camps, also went viral.