Here’s How One Man Is Forcing Twitter to Confront Its Abuse Problem

He claims the social media giant ignored hundreds of his complaints.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Despite various attempts to crack down on trolls and abusive behavior, Twitter remains a uniquely popular platform for unconstrained hateful, often violent rhetoric. It’s a pervasive problem, and the targets of vicious harassment aren’t left with too many options for stopping or punishing it. 

Shahak Shapia, a comedian living in Germany, claims he has attempted to report more than 300 anti-semitic and homophobic tweets that he received over the last six months. According to Shapia, most of his complaints were ignored. When a tweet was occasionally removed, Twitter failed to let him know. Fed up with Twitter’s overwhelming silence, he traveled to the company’s Hamburg offices with cans of spray paint in hand to force the social media giant to confront the very same hate tweets for themselves. To see what happened, watch the video below. 

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

payment methods

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate