Shahak Shapira #HeyTwitter

Tired of reporting racist and xenophobic comments to Twitter and Facebook and getting minimal response, German-Israeli artist and comedian Shahak Shapira decided to try to draw attention to such content in another way. Instead of continuing to try to get companies to take the content down, he amplified it, by stenciling 30 racist, antisemitic, xenophobic, and homophobic comments onto the street in front of Twitter’s Hamburg offices in August 2017, with the help of others. “If Twitter forces me to see those things, then they’ll have to see them too,” he said. Because Shapira amplified the tweets by painting them, he also obliged a larger audience to see them:  pedestrians passing by Twitter’s offices. 

In a video Shapira created, passersby are shown photographing the tweet-covered sidewalk. The Brazilian counterspeech project Mirrors of Racism used a similar approach - amplifying hateful speech on billboards and then producing a video of people reacting to the campaign.