Everyday some 200 million web users fill out a CAPTCHA to prove that they‘re human and not a spam robot, usually by transcribing a word distorted so computers can’t read it. But what really separates us from robots is empathy, and empathy is also the foundation for promoting civil rights. So in February 2012 The Swedish NGO Civil Rights Defenders started developing a CAPTCHA based on empathy. After 6 months of development the CAPTCHA was spam bot tested for security, a wiki on how to implement it was created and the CAPTCHA was launched.

In order to get passed the CAPTCHA you needed to write the fitting emotion in response to a documented violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This function triggered a global debate around civil rights, internet trolls and hate. In just a few days the CAPTCHA was implemented on several websites and reloaded over 300 million times. Soon hackers from around the world volunteered to translate the CAPTCHA to more human and computer languages. Leading opinion makers within tech, media, politics and academia promoted the CAPTCHA on Twitter and the debate that followed in high end media such as Wired, NBC News, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Discovery, Mashable, Russian Times, etc., reached well over 700 million people – proving the fundamental point: empathy is a strong tool.

1.Raise awareness internationally about Civil Rights Defenders and their work in broad traditional media in the major languages.

2.Start a global discussion round prioritized cases of human rights violations on twitter reaching important opinion leaders within politics, journalism and academia.

3.Establish a permanent presence on social media platforms with a flexible tool enabling the organization to raise contextual topics.

1. Awareness: The media coverage in high end media such as Wired, NBC News, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Discovery, Mashable, Russian Times, etc., reached well over 700 million people worldwide.

2. Involvement: The tool Tweetreach was used to monitor the Twitter debate showing a involvement by well over 20 million people including the world’s leading universities like Harvard, MIT Media LAB and Stanford as well as world leading media profiles like Pete Cashmore. In addition Hackers helped translate the CAPTCHA into several other human and computer languages.

3. Established Platform: To this date the CAPTCHA has been tracked to have been implemented on several sites around the world and has been downloaded over 300 million times – by bots and humans.

We employed a trickle down media strategy targeting international elite media in relevant segments, allowing our concept to filter down.

Prioritizing media with high social media integration to spark discussion.

An implementation matrix was created with identified media segments on the one side and media-angles/topics on the other. This launch plan was executed parallel with social media monitoring and involvement in discussions.

From a media analysis we contacted media and journalists with an interest in the topic of internet freedom and hate/trolls as well as civil rights.

It was also necessary for the CAPTCHA to be a solid functioning product since we expected it to be scrutinized by journalists, hackers and enthusiasts before anyone would consider implement it. Large efforts were put in place to make sure it would work logically as well as securely.

In recent years digital and social media has played a significant part in alerting the world to violations of human rights and also in mobilizing protests against oppression. Following this development Civil Rights Defenders has engaged in projects educating advocates of civil rights around the world in digital self-defense against persecution and abduction. But the organization also needed a presence of its own in social media. The challenge was not only to monitor social media platforms but to create a tool for activation connected to specific projects. To make things even more complicated – even though Civil Rights Defenders celebrated their 30 year anniversary they were largely unknown due to a complete makeover of name and brand.

The five success factors:

Context: Tapping into current events (Global debate over internet hate and trolls)

Realness: Creating a real highly functional web tool (secure, easily implemented to media sites and also adoptable to current issues)

Targeting: Involving communities with high digital and social activity (tech community as well as academia and media).

Channeling: Trickle down earned media strategy targeting elite media within relevant segments (agenda setting media with high twitter integration such as Wired, Mashable and Huffington Post).

Agenda: Taking part in the current debate over internet trolls and hate in article comments etc (involving journalists and politicians)