When a lottery defends press freedom

da Maud Largeaud , AdForum

Saturday March 12 was World Day Against Cyber Censorship. To mark the occasion, Reporters Without Borders unveiled a way to help journalists expose the truth in countries – like Russia, Turkey and Brazil – where independent media outlets are censored or blocked. Even in those countries, there’s one piece of information that’s widely disseminated each week: the winning national lottery numbers. For the initiative, those numbers become a code which, when tapped into the search engines of social media like Twitter, immediately direct the user to an uncensored news stream called “The Truth Wins”. If the account is shut down, another one is opened using the new set of winning numbers. And of course as the lotteries are state-owned, they will never be censored. The days of hidden truths are numbered.