People's racist Facebook comments are ending up on billboards near their homes

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

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...

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.

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?