For world day against cyber censorship, Reporters Without Borders wanted a campaign to reach people in countries with press censorship and social media restrictions. The problem: every time the government has a social media account removed; the truth loses another address. Journalists can open a new account, but people would not know where to find it and it can easily get blocked again. It would need an address that is changing faster than censors can react, that cannot be foreseen and on top every week a huge media campaign so everyone in the country knows the new address. And we came up with a solution: the lottery numbers.
In countries with press censorship the truth is hard to find. But even where the media gets strictly controlled – one thing is always in the news: The state-owned lotteries. So, we decided to highjack them for Reporters Without Borders (RSF). To bypass state censorship, we turned the lottery numbers into an access code for journalism on Twitter. By embedding the current lottery numbers into Twitter accounts with independent information, people could simply type the numbers in the Twitter search bar and the truth would show up.
Governments could send a request to Twitter to block the accounts – but bureaucracy takes time. And before they succeed, we can open a new account with the new numbers.
A creative idea, unexpected enough to raise the attention of social media communities and with films, gifs, illustrations and photojournalism we made sure our content was visually impressive enough to get shared.
Countries with many removal requests to Twitter (Twitter transparency report), with a low ranking in RSF’s press freedom index and state-owned lotteries where chosen: Turkey, Russia and Brazil, all with large national lotteries. Countries with low income per capita, have high numbers of regular lottery players (E.g. in Brazil more than 70% of the population play the lottery regularly). We partnered with local journalists and large Twitter accounts (e.g. Can Dündar +5M Followers) and launched a social media campaign (in the countries’ native language) with the CTA to share the idea.
Governments could send a request to Twitter to block the accounts – but bureaucracy takes time. And before they succeed, we can open a new account with the new numbers.
And since we highjacked the government-owned lotteries the regimes even involuntarily promoted our access code all across the state media: Fighting government censorship with the help of the government.
The lottery numbers were embedded in Twitter accounts with independent journalism. The Twitter handle, the accounts bio and tweets themselves contained the current lottery numbers. By typing the lottery numbers into the Twitter search bar, the algorithm identifies accounts containing the numbers as valid search results.
The mechanic was used on “The Truth Wins” Twitter accounts and adapted by journalists from Russia, Turkey and Brazil to spread independent news in the countries' native language. Articles that previously got blocked where minted directly into the Ethereum blockchain(accessible through ENS-domain links) to make them resistant to censorship and were shared through our Twitter accounts. The campaign was running from March – May 2022, social media assets were posted on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn, a film explained the idea and people could learn more about the initiative and find the current lottery numbers on the campaign’s website: the-truth-wins.com
The campaign was featured on 12 different Twitter Accounts with a combined reach of 6,2 Million Followers. More than 260 independent news tweets (accessible by searching the national lottery numbers) were published. Through the campaign duration the followers across all accounts increased by +150 K and accumulated more than 750 K impressions. 85 news articles were published about the campaign (including “The New York Times”, “Forbes”, “FastCompany”) with a total organic media reach of more than 170 million. Donations for Reporters Without Borders increased by 39% (March/April) and all donations are being used to mirror blocked Russian news websites and make the truth accessible again on an even larger scale. Five Russian websites have already been mirrored – the new addresses are being shared through “The Truth Wins” Twitter accounts.
In countries with media censorship journalists have their websites blocked, tweets withheld, and entire accounts removed. They try to fight back by opening multiple new accounts under different names, but people don’t know where to find them anymore. This is why we turned the lottery numbers into an access code to unlock the truth. Even if an account gets blocked the numbers cannot get censored and provide an overarching access code that stays valid on multiple accounts. When people want to independently inform themselves, now they don’t have to constantly search for new accounts but just look up the current lottery numbers to access independent journalism.
With independent journalism globally under attack and a disastrous media situation in Russia – the fight for press freedom and access to information is of significant importance to avoid disinformation and ensure democratic values and basic human rights.
