Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Twitter Removes Racist, Anti-Semitic Posts After Activist’s Graffiti Action

(JTA) — Twitter has removed a handful of racist tweets and suspended several accounts after a German-Israeli satirist spray painted about 30 of them outside the company’s headquarters in Hamburg.

Shahak Shapira used water soluble spray-paint to write the nearly 30 offensive tweets on Twitter’s building and on the ground around it. He claimed responsibility for the act on Monday in a tweet, which said: “I reported about 300 hate tweets. Twitter didn’t delete ’em, so I sprayed them in front of their office.”

The tweets included “Let’s get together and gas Jews again … the old days were nice.” And “Here comes another horde of migrants. Did they miss the stop at Auschwitz?”

By Wednesday, Twitter had deleted three tweets, suspended four accounts and withheld seven accounts in Germany, the Associated Press reported. Fifteen other post, with racist and anti-Semitic content, remain on Twitter, according to the AP.

Twitter has not responded directly to Shapira, he said.

“It would be nice if Twitter had reacted,” Shapira told the AP. “What I want is that these flagged posts are reviewed the way Facebook does. What Facebook does isn’t perfect, but at least they are making an effort.”

A video Shapira posted of him spray painting the offending tweets received over 100,000 views in 48 hours.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.