Twitter’s SF pathway stencils ruffle plumes at municipal government

Twitter seems in hot water with its home town. The source of the friction has actually appeared all over downtown San Francisco in the kind of tweets stenciled on streets as part of a guerilla ad campaign.

“Twitter is like running up the down escalator,” states one near a BART escalator. “Twitter is garbage and I am a raccoon,” states another, stenciled near a trash bin.

They ended up being popular fodder on, well, Twitter, with some commenters calling them “awesome” and “genius,” while some questioned their legality.

And that’s the rub. Regardless of whether you concur with the stenciled tweets’ messages, which are produced utilizing a spray-paint-like chalk, they contravene with the law, stated Rachel Gordon, a spokesperson for San Francisco Public Works Department.

“These ads are not sanctioned,” she stated. “Our sidewalks are not to be used for billboards.”

She likewise cautioned that the business might be on the hook for the expense of cleaning them up.

“Our street cleaning and street inspection teams have been made aware of these illegal advertisements, and if it becomes necessary for us to remove them we will be sending a bill to the offender.”

This isn’t the very first time San Francisco has actually taken a tech business to job for spray painting advertisements on city pathways. In 2012, IBM consented to pay the city a $100,000 fine and practically $20,000 in clean-up expenses after the business’s Peace, Love & Linux project. The city counted more than 300 circumstances on its streets of the easy stencil, which included a peace sign, a heart and a penguin — the authorities Linux mascot.

Twitter’s project comes in the middle of an environment in which tech giants have actually ended up being a sign for wealth variation and gentrification in the Bay Area. Many in San Francisco slammed a questionable “Twitter tax break” the city embraced in 2011 that got rid of taxes including payroll and stock choices for 6 tech business.

Twitter didn’t instantly react to an ask for remark.