Ilaria Trapani and Marco Manco are systemic and communication design students at ISIA (the Higher Institute for Artistic Industries) in Rome.
As Ilaria Trapani and Marco Manco’s work expands into the real world, it reveals hate messages hidden behind funny popular images, internet slang and memes. The work makes evident the creative ways in which people can share offensive content and bypass social media content moderators to target marginalized or vulnerable communities. The work urges us to reflect on how discriminatory and offensive messages can propagate on social media and cause harm, all the while inviting us to decode their offensive nature and find ways to counter them.
Censorship algorithms cannot understand what is offensive and what is not. Social networks share hateful memes at an impressive rate. The combination of seemingly neutral texts and images manages to create offensive content that becomes viral, thus massively reinforcing cognitive bias.
