AMNESTY IMAGINES A WORLD WITHOUT FREEDOM
PROBLEM:
In October 2015, five Hong Kong booksellers were abducted for selling controversial books. Only 4 have returned.
To prevent this kind of oppression, we needed to get Hong Kong behind freedom of expression, and Amnesty International.
SOLUTION:
So we did the unthinkable, publishing our own controversial literature and selling it.
With one small difference, it was all redacted. We created the Amnesty Bookstore, stocked with our own unique redacted books.
We also redacted the Hong Kong Free Press website for a day, so that all of it's 3.5 million readers experienced a world without freedom of expression live.
RESULTS:
The bookstore sold out in two days, the extended campaign raising over a million dollars in total.
The redaction of Hong Kong Free Press reached over 3.5 million people (half the population of Hong Kong) and the Reddit thread for the campaign is in the top ten most popular posts of all time, only slightly behind the world famous Umbrella Revolution of 2014. But most importantly, we reminded people that the censorship remains as strong as ever, and that everyone needed Amnesty’s help to keep fighting it.
To experience the digital redaction of the HKFP website, follow this link:
To advertise the campaign, we created a series of posters in which we dissected Article 27 (which protects freedom of expression) to reveal the people it protects, from Edwards Snowden to Booksellers.
Below are pictures of the event and the collateral we created:
