Be careful what you say.
A campaign in Brazil is blowing up the words of vitriolic Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR) commenters and placing them on billboards throughout the country. The aim of the project is to shame.
Criola, a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of Afro-Brazilian women, started the campaign in order to raise awareness about the impacts of hateful and racist speech online. The project is called “racismo virtual, consequências reais” in the country’s native Portuguese, which translates to “virtual racism, real consequnces.”
“We wanted to provoke a reflection,” the group says on a website dedicated to the campaign. “We just wanted to raise awareness and start a discussion, in order to make people think about the consequences before posting this kind of comments on the internet. Because, after all, the worst enemy of racism is silence.”
The group identifies racist comments posted to social networks and then uses geolocation data associated with the commenters’ profiles in order to determine where they might live. Then the group plasters images of the comments on displays near the commenters’ homes while obscuring their profile pictures and names.
“We omitted names and faces of the authors – we had no intention of exposing them,” the website says.
The campaign is a direct reaction to an incident earlier this year in which online commenters subjected Maria Júlia Coutinho, Brazil’s first black meteorologist to star on a major network news show, to hateful speech online.
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