The campaign became a trending topic in Twitter in just an hour. People started to erase their tweets, videos, status updates and turned the Fading News Campaign into a social movement. Journalists, celebrities, politicians and bloggers all over the world supported the campaign.

With no media budget we reached over 32 million people and had a number of impressions over 104 million. And the real result; president Abdullah Gül heard the voice of people and revised the law. Now it’s necessary to have a court order to erase content on the internet.

On February 18th we put a countdown timer on 100s of news articles on Radikal.com.tr. For 4 hours articles faded out and at the end of their 4th hour they completely disappeared. We turned the website into a page of censorship. This way, readers saw how the internet would look if the law passed. The columnists of the paper and all social accounts of Radikal informed the target audience about the campaign, further expanding the campaign’s reach.

During the Gezi Park protests none of the big news channels showed a single report. The pressure of the government on the media left people uninformed.

That’s why the internet became the main source of news and the government declared war on social media by creating the new internet law. A law that allows authorities to erase any internet content within 4 hours and without a court order.

Radikal, one of the major newspapers of Turkey wanted to raise awareness about this subject. Yet we only had a few days to create a strong impact. So we decided to make readers experience the censored internet by erasing the news on radikal.com.tr.