Petition is addressed to: BVG

Dear BVG,

We've had enough! Every day we are verbally abused, insulted, and degraded in your subways. We are called “lazy” when we have lost our jobs or “illegal migrants” because we had to flee our homeland. We are called “climate criminals” because we are working for a better future. As “woke lunatics”, “Israel haters”, and “social parasites”...

Dear BVG, we are talking about the screens hanging from the ceilings of your subways and the content that runs incessantly on them. You have sold the best advertising space in your trains to Springer-Verlag – and thus to media outlets that, more than any others, stand for disinformation and misanthropic propaganda. They make violence against women a problem of “uncontrolled immigration”, violate privacy and human dignity, display the corpses of children, and promote crimes against humanity. No, Die Welt, B.Z., and BILD are not newspapers like any others. Their business model is not journalism or entertainment, but the spreading of hatred, lies, and division in our society. No other publisher is reprimanded so often by the Press Council. Have you really forgotten so quickly how Springer itself invented the lie that your beloved advertising face, Kazim Akboga (RIP), threw himself in front of one of your subways? Perhaps you don't care?

Dear BVG, we are the ones who suffer from your pact with Springer-Verlag. Trainees and partygoers, wheelchair users and flea market visitors, Muslims, migrants, Jews, and people looking for housing, shift workers, and queer people. In short: your customers. We pay our ticket price so that you can get us from A to B quickly and safely. Not for turning us, against our will, into consumers of a publishing house that declares us the enemy every day. And what appreciation should we still feel as employees and trainees when, in addition to your low salaries, hard shift work, and increasing workload, we are also personally affected by the hate speech on your screens?

Dear BVG, we need you and you need us. We hope that we – your colleagues and paying customers – will once again be your focus, rather than the interests of a publishing house that deeply despises the diversity that is also evident every day on your trains. Of course, we do not accept the argument that you are not responsible for the inflammatory content and biased disinformation on the screens in your own trains. Get the operator of Berliner Fenster, mc R&D GmbH, to send information that is truly relevant to us and serves to promote cohesion in our city. Make sure that we feel comfortable with you again and throw Springer out the window!

Sincerely, your daily commuters and employees.