Jeremy Deller
© Fabio De Paola/the Guardian‘It’s just a poster’ … artist Jeremy Deller.
Jeremy Deller, the Turner prize-winning artist, has developed an effective sideline in timely political posters. Last week, in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, posters the artist had designed were handed out at Liverpool's Lime Street and London's Euston stations. Printed on bubblegum pink paper, they instructed commuters how to delete their Facebook profiles. According to Rapid Response Unit News (RRU), the Liverpool-based news bureau who commissioned and distributed the posters, copies were also plastered inside Facebook's London headquarters.

The posters explain in six steps how to delete a Facebook account, from "Go to Facebook's deletion page" and "type in the captcha code" to suggestions for what to do if the code doesn't work. Step six specifies that "total account deletion can take up to 14 days".

Deller told the Guardian that the impetus for the posters was "a combination of reading about Facebook's involvement in the US election, and Mark Z's faux naive lack of accountability."

Jeremy Deller’s leave facebook poster
© RRU News teamHow to leave Facebook, Jeremy Deller’s poster.
Though the posters were pointedly topical, Deller had written the text before the Cambridge Analytica scandal was broken by the Observer. In February, at the opening party for the newly renovated Kettle's Yard, members of staff wore red T-shirts with the Facebook deletion instructions printed on the back, in contrast to the words printed on the front: a playlist of Aretha Franklin songs.

When the Guardian first asked Deller about the posters, the artist replied: "I don't understand, it's just a poster." Yet, as the artist proved last year, posters can be highly effective. During the general election campaign, Deller designed posters lampooning Theresa May's relentlessly repeated soundbite. They read "Strong and stable my arse". One Guardian journalist who put them up in his windows found that they drew admiring crowds.

The poster's producer RRU News is a newly established cultural experiment set up to explore how news is received. Located in Liverpool's St John's Market, the bureau is commissioning artists to act as reporters, creatively responding to global events as they happen. Public engagement and free distribution are central to their actions, which chimes with Deller's general approach to his artworks.

Many of Deller's notable works involve collaborations with the public. The Battle of Orgreave re-staged a flashpoint of the 1984 miners' strike, while We're Here Because We're Here saw 1,500 men dressed in first world war uniforms mingle with commuters to mark the first day of the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.

Deller would not be drawn on the political implications of his poster and T-shirt: "It's just a thought, really." Juxtaposing the Franklin playlist with advice on how to deleting one's Facebook profile is, the artist says, "just a suggestion. On one side of the T-shirt, "a piece of poetry of all the song titles, a thing of beauty," and on the other, "a very bare practical technical piece of info." Or, as Deller puts it, "two potentially life-changing moments."

Kettle's Yard is still selling the T-shirts: though not available online, they can be ordered over the phone. As for the posters, RRU News says: "All artistic content will be distributed freely across national and international broadcast, print and online media, with some performed or exhibited at venues across the city."