Shahak Shapira, 29, from Berlin, claims to have reported around 300 hate tweets to the social media platform but says a lot of them are still up.

Shapira said he also reported about 150 similar examples of hate on Facebook, 80 percent of which were removed within three days, he said.

Shahak Shapira, who is of German-Israeli descent, says he's reported almost 450 homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, and sexist posts to Twitter and Facebook over the last six months.

So, in response to Twitter's lack of action, the 29-year-old made a decision to spray-paint a number of hateful tweets outside the company's headquarters in Hamburg, Germany, in a bid to get them to act.

A video posted on Monday (7 August) shows Shahak Shapira spray-painting messages like, "Germany needs a final solution to Islam", "Let's gas the Jews" and "N*****s are a plague to our society" on the ground next to the entrance to Twitter's building.

Twitter is now taking action on 10 times as many abusive accounts compared with the same time previous year, he added.

Starting in October, social media companies operating in Germany could face fines as high as 50 million euros, or almost S$80 million, if they do not respond to requests to remove illegal, racist or slanderous comments and posts within 24 hours of being notified.

A German comedian took matters into his own hands when Twitter failed to remove offensive hate posts on its platform. Recently, the law has been used to battle hate speech against migrants.

The Berlin-based performer, who is Jewish, reported around 300 tweets to the company but the majority were not removed. Sensitivity surrounding the callous phenomenon of online hate speech is heightened as memories of World War Two and the Holocaust live on, and legal ramifications are being ramped up accordingly.

This is not the first time Shapira has sought to draw attention to hateful messages on social media. "If Twitter forces me to see these things, then they'll have to see them too", he says.

While Shapiro has painted Twitter's office with offline tweets, he praised Facebook's efforts towards putting a stop to offensive content on the social media platform.