In October 2016, 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.

So we did the unthinkable, publishing our own controversial literature and selling it through a pop up store.

However, we also wanted to take the idea online, real time, to give people a demonstration of life without Freedom of Expression. To do this we partnered with the Hong Kong Free Press, censoring their entire website for a day – so that when its 3.5 million readers logged in to read the news, it disappeared before their eyes, however people could then remove the censorship when they read the Amnesty banner (the only un-redacted text).

This caused anger and concern, but most of all it gave people a chilling reminder of what could happen should freedom of expression vanish.

We developed a banner that could edit the code of the Hong Kong Free Press website in real time, so that even though the news stories were constantly changing and updating, when people logged on, all the text and images were redacted to black. They could also then play by clicking the banner, turning the redaction on and off, really giving them the sense of the truth being hidden by oppression.

We also used this code in social media posts, allowing people to post redacted comments and text into their own feeds.

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 2015.

This also drove people to engage with the bookstore, which sold out in two days, putting over 1000 pieces of branded protest art into the homes of passionate Hong Kongers. Through this and other endeavours, including selling limited edition art from Vhils, Shephard Fairey and more, the campaign raised over a million dollars in total.

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.