A civil rights group in Brazil has taken a rather unusual approach to tackling racist comments on social media: it’s printed loads of them out and pasted them on billboards around the country.
The “virtual racism, real consequences” campaign has seen posts on Facebook and Twitter advertised on huge boards in order to drive home the fact that these comments, while seemingly transient, have, well, “real consequences”. It is led by Criola, a group founded in 1992 and which is led by black women to defend black women’s rights in a “cross and integrated perspective” .
The group claim that they put posts on boards “near [the] author’s houses” in order to maximise their impact. The name and photo of the social media user, however, is blurred out on each billboard, as the intention isn’t to publicly shame them, but to make them see how public and hurtful their comments were.
This post uses the racial slur “nego”, and instructs the reader to “GFY [go f**** yourself]… I dunno [about] you but I wash myself”:
