Artist stencils hate speech tweets outside Twitter HQ to highlight failure to deal with offensive messages

German artist Shahak Shapira takes matters in his own hands after he had enough of Twitter's "failure" to deal with hate-speech tweets

A German artist who says Twitter fails to deal with hate speech stencilled offensive tweets in protest onto the streets outside the company’s Hamburg headquarters.

A Youtube video posted on Monday by Shahak Shapira and his campaigners shows them stencilling tweets which they describe as “racist, misogynistic and inhuman”.

“Let’s gas some Jews” and “Germany needs a final solution to Islam” were just a handful of the offensive tweets stencilled onto the street.

The German artist says he has reported around 300 comments to Twitter but has only nine replies over six months, each stating that there was no violation of Twitter’s policy.

He says posts reported to the social media giants “weren’t just plain insults or jokes, but absolutely serious threats of violence, homophobia, xenophobia or holocaust denial”.

“I haven’t received a single mail telling me the tweet was actually removed”, said Mr Shapira.

The campaigner added: “Occasionally, Twitter would remove a tweet without letting me know - although they promise to inform you as soon as your case is processed which makes it impossible for me to say where my reports ended up”

Speaking in the 5-minute video, Mr Shapira said that if he must see offensive remarks on Twitter, “they’ll [Twitter] have to see them too”.

In a report available to the public, Twitter only discloses removal requests from official bodies such as governments, police, security agencies or court orders.

The removal requests it speaks of only deal with those infringing specific laws in a different countries, citing Nazi symbols banned under German law as one example.

Twitter received 65 removal requests from the UK Government, police and other UK security agencies in the second half of 2016. Only one removal request from a UK court order was registered in the same period.

Speaking to Reuters, Twitter's head of public policy for Europe, Karen White, said: "Over the past six months, we've introduced a host of new tools and features to improve Twitter for everyone.

"We've also improved the in-app reporting process for our users and we continue to review and iterate on our policies and their enforcement", she added.

In July, the Home Secretary urged tech companies to do more to crack down on “safe spaces” breeding “violent” content. Amber Rudd’s plea with Twitter, Facebook and Google reportedly focused on content which encouraged terrorist activity, as opposed to hate speech.

On the back of Prime Minister Theresa May’s call for stricter regulation of the internet earlier in the year, Twitter said that it continues “to expand the use of technology as part of a systematic approach to removing this type of content”.