The internet has become a main channel for racists to spread hate, especially in Italy.

Rolling Stone Magazine, long time fighter against racism, wanted to do something against it.

A secret troll operation takes away power from racists:

if you’re watching racist videos, we take away your internet.

By increasing the file size of videos by multiple times.

Racism in Italy is like a virus that spreads on the internet from post to post, from video to video, making it more violent and vulgar day by day, reaching levels never seen before.

As always, the world of entertainment and music tries to raise awareness, but simple words and declarations of intent no longer seem to have the strength of the past. Today, we want to set aside our words and move to action doing something concrete and effective before any other declaration, counteracting this racist virus with its own weapon, to make internet a better place for real, even for a while.

In Italy, 98% of people have a mobile plan with limited data. On average 6 GB per month.

So we set up a targeted Facebook campaign that lures racists to a fake microsite with racist videos.

These videos are secretly increased in size:

From on average 15MB to up to 600 MB

When racists watch the videos, they burn up to 40 times more data – and after a few minutes they're offline.

By developing a custom video player and combining different methods to increase data usage dynamically depending on the viewer, we could burn as much data as fast as possible without being detected.

By making the website accessible tonly hrough mobile facebook ads targeted at racists, we made sure that only racists watched the videos and burned their giga.

+5000 GB burned in 10 days.

+800 Racists offline.

28 Mio. Contacts after reveal.

+1500% Traffic increase on rollingstone.it