The European Initiative for Media Pluralism promotes an European petition, called ECI (European Citizen Initiative): a tool of direct democracy to force the UE parliament to enact laws in defence of freedom of expression and media pluralism. Their objective was to stimulate participation to reach their signature goal.

We developed ALTphabet, an encrypted language to protect online messages, created by combining the ALT key with the normal characters of the keyboard. Then we staged a symbolic action to shake up public opinion. We made a partnership with some of the most important European online newspapers, "Repubblica" (Italy), "Le Soir" (Belgium), "Der Standard" (Austria), "Capital" (Bulgaria), "Der Journalist" (Germany), "Open Democracy" (UK) and "CCMC" (Cyprus), and ask journalists to write and publish articles written using the ALTphabet code. At the end of each article, we invited users to visit alphabet.org to decode the message, sign the petition and use the ALTphabet code themselves.

Head editors and journalists were contacted directly and we asked their availability to support and join the campaign by writing and publishing articles using the ALTphabet code. After the first appearance, others online newspapers and blogs joined the initiative and spontaneously published articles in ALTphabet.

The daily signatures increased by 700%.

All articles written in Altphabet and published on newspapers were completely free,

as journalists spontenously joined the initiative.

The campaign ran in 7 different countries, investing 0 euro for media.

The campaign was featured in more than 150 articles and blog post.

Hundreds of tweets written in Altphabet were generated.

All this free media coverage helped us to reach more than 8 million people across Europe, generating an equivalent media value of 2.5 million euro.

Influential politicians, such as Martin Shulz (euro parliamentary) and Stefano Rodotà (italian presidential candidate) signed the petition.