
People's racist Facebook comments are ending up on billboards near their homes - kawera
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/peoples-racist-facebook-comments-ending-234400980.html
======
danielvf
This might* backfire. I can just imagine the race among immature teenagers to
say the most offensive things they can dream up in hopes of getting their
words on a nearby billboard.

This campaign follows the same format as many promotions asking you to tweet
about product X, with the best tweets going up in Times Square. The goal of
course, being to make more tweets about product X.

*by might, I mean will

~~~
cballard
See also (in the other direction?): #mynypd

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-
nation/wp/2014/04/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-
nation/wp/2014/04/22/well-the-mynypd-hashtag-sure-backfired-quickly/)

------
CM30
So you're giving attention seekers (read, a lot of trolls) a way to get even
more attention for saying the most horrible things they can think of.

Why do I get the feeling this isn't going to work well? Seems like a pretty
good marketing strategy actually, especially if your product/service relates
to freedom of speech, censorship, harassment or something else and you can
stick a link in at the end of the tweet.

I also wonder how the hell they try and verify where anyone actually lives,
given the existence of proxies and other such devices. Seems like it could be
very easily 'abused' to frame someone else, especially if you know it could
cause a falling out between them and someone they're close to.

And on a funnier note... good deal for bilboard owners. Flame the hell out of
people on Twitter, then jack the prices up a few hundred times and watch a
charity pay to put your angry messages up in the street...

------
kazinator
> _" We omit names and faces of the authors because we have no intention of
> exposing anyone._

The big reason you shouldn't publish names and faces (even if you otherwise
_want_ to) is because you have not verified their authenticity; you can be
gamed into acting as the unwitting tool in some smear campaign whereby an
innocent victim is made to look like a racist.

~~~
kawera
Exactly, naming names carries a huge legal risk.

------
dudul
"We omit names and faces of the authors because we have no intention of
exposing anyone. We just want to educate people so that in future they think
about the consequences before posting racist comments,"

This is always the same thing, educating people, make them realize that
comments have consequences, etc. But, at the end of the day, does it ever
work? I mean if someone makes racist comments that's because they're racist,
they're racist in a world where racism is daily condemned, how can a billboard
change that?

All these campaigns against racism, domestic violence, etc. Do they ever yield
any result?

~~~
rexfm
I wish they wouldn't blur the images.

~~~
stevetrewick
Which you posted from a pseudonymous throwaway account. Classy.

~~~
cballard
That isn't logically inconsistent, i.e. "if you don't want things associated
with your name forever, don't put them on the internet under your name". If
someone posts racist bile under a pseudonym, it also won't be associated with
his or her name.

kazinator's comment is the real issue with that idea, I think.

