Twitter Removes Racist, Anti-Semitic Posts After Activist’s Graffiti Action
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(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.
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