Comedian gives Twitter taste of own medicine
A GERMAN Jewish comedian spraypainted 30 hate tweets on to the pavement outside Twitter’s Hamburg headquarters last Friday morning.
Shahak Shapira carried out the protest after the social media company refused to remove the racist, homophobic and antisemitic material from the internet despite being repeatedly told about the existence of such content over a six-month period.
Mr Shapira used stencils to leave the abusive messages on the street. Comments included “Judenschwein” (Jewish Pig), “N **** rs are a plague to our society”, “Let’s gas some Jews together”, “Gays to Auschwitz” and “We need a final solution for Muslims in Germany”.
In a video of his latest project, Mr Shapira said that he had reported “about 450 hate comments to Twitter and Facebook” in the previous six months.
“The statements I reported weren’t just plain insults or jokes, but absolutely serious threats of violence… things no one should say and no one should read,” he added.
He said that he had sent around 150 comments to Facebook, which removed around 80 per cent of them within a couple of days. On more than 300 tweets reported to Twitter, however, Mr Shapira said he “received only nine answers… each of them stating there was no violation of Twitter’s rules.
“That’s it. All other reports were left unanswered. So I thought, ‘OK, if Twitter forces me to see those things then they’ll have to see them, too’.”
Mr Shapira took 30 of the worst tweets and sprayed them on the street
outside the Twitter office. To enter their offices, employees had to walk through the area painted with the tweets and, as Mr Shapiro put it, “they’ll have to look at all the beautiful tweets their company likes to ignore so much”.
The display attracted a lot of attention. The police showed up, but left again soon after, making no arrests.
“This will never be big enough to even visualise the amount of hate tweets on Twitter but maybe we can at least give them food for thought”, Mr Shapira said.
He made headlines around the world in January after another project of his, “YOLOcaust”, photoshopped pictures that people had shared of themselves behaving in a disrespectful manner at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin over actual photos of Shoah victims. Mr Shapira said he would only remove their photos from the YOLOcaust website if they sent a message asking him to “undouche me”.
Later on Friday morning, cleaners removed the tweets directly outside the entrance to Twitter’s HQ, but left the vast majority of spray-painted messages, which were in the surrounding area.
Mr Shapira said this action “fits well with Twitter’s policy of cleaning in front of their front door and leaving the rest to be someone else’s problem”.