Tokyo No Hate

In Japan, Twitter launched in 2008 and quickly became dominant among social media platforms. By 2023, it had about 52 million users - half the total adult population of the country. Japanese Twitter (now X) has also long been beset by hateful content, including homophobia, misogyny, and especially attacks on people of Korean and Chinese descent. After largely fruitless efforts to report such content and persuade Twitter to take it down, Masayuki Ishino organized a protest inspired by Shahak Shapira’s demonstration outside Twitter’s offices in Hamburg, Germany. On September 8, 2017, more than 100 members of Ishino’s group Tokyo No Hate plastered the sidewalk outside of Twitter’s Japanese headquarters with hard copies of hundreds of vicious tweets such as “‘Chon’ (a slur used against Koreans) are savages, aren't they?” and “Women are an inferior species, and therefore must be extinguished.”

“If we leave these kinds of posts on Twitter, if society continues to allow this kind of language to be published,” Ishino said in an interview with a journalist, “an incident similar to Charlottesville (Ishino was referring to the violent August 2017 “Unite the Right '' extremist march in Charlottesville, Virginia) will likely take place in Japan.”

After the demonstration, demonstrators ceremoniously walked over the printouts (symbolically “stomping” out the hate), and then threw them into a large homemade garbage bin marked “hate speech.”