- What was the brief?
Tobias Natterer: Reporters Without Borders (RSF) told us that every time a website or a social media account gets censored or blocked the truth loses another address. They can open a new URL or a new Account – but people would have trouble to find the new address. So we were brainstorming about the problem and thought it would be interesting to have an address that is always changing and therefore is faster than censorship – but at the same time people would still know it because its all over the state media: The state-owned lottery numbers.
- What are the objectives of the campaign?
TN: Next to making critical and censored information accessible – we want to create awareness for the importance of press freedom and raise donations to fund the work of Reporters Without Borders. All donations will be used to uncensor blocked websites and make them accessible again (e.g. in Russia).
- "The Truth Wins" targets 3 countries. How was the choice to target these countries made?
TN: Russia – censorship has always been a problem but right now it's worse than ever before.
Turkey – is number one in the world in regards of legal takedown requests towards Twitter.
Brazil – with the upcoming election political motivated censorship is on the rise in Brazil.
- How do you promote the campaign in these countries?
TN: We have Journalists and news outlets from these countries sharing our content on our Channels with their communities. Right now (after four days) each channel has a Twitter reach of 5k impressions mainly in communities from these countries. We are communicating in Russian, Portuguese and Turkish and most comments we get are also in the native tongue of the featured country. We are also spreading the idea through mainstream media and a social media campaign to activate people to share it with their communities online.
(Left: Tobias Natterer / Right: Saurabh Kakade)
- What role did you play in the “Truth Wins” project alongside DDB?
Saurabh Kakade: Creatives from DDB (Tobias & Sandro) reached out to us with the core concept of the lottery mechanism early on and we were able to brainstorm together and add our innovation expertise i.e., in this case, the suggestion to make use of blockchain technology. This enabled us to be prepared for scenarios, such as the one we are currently encountering with censorship in Russia, where Twitter and other social media and many independent news organizations have been slowed down.
- What was the most challenging element to achieve?
SK: We facilitated a way to make censored information accessible via a decentralized technology called Ethereum Name Service (ENS). Here articles are stored on blockchain-based archives (InterPlanetary File System) in a peer-to-peer storage network, making them free and resistant to any kind of centralized control or censorship thus giving people in Russia access to otherwise censored articles. You can access those here.
- The functionality of the project is based on blockchain. Why was that necessary?
SK: The beauty of using blockchain for this initiative is that the information that was banned elsewhere is stored in a decentralized manner, making it free and resistant to any kind of manipulation or censorship. Blockchain technology is thus perfect for the mission “freedom of speech".
This enabled us to be prepared for scenarios, such as the one we are currently encountering with censorship in Russia, where Twitter has restricted access and some other social media and many independent news organizations have been fully blocked. (Source)
To discover more about the project, go to: https://the-truth-wins.com/en/