UNCENSORED LIBRARY

In countries where governments tightly control the media and ban hundreds of news sites, it’s still possible to access Minecraft, a video game owned by Microsoft since 2014. So the nonprofit Reporters Without Borders created a back door within the game, building a virtual library stocked with censored articles. In Saudi Arabia, for example, visitors to the Uncensored Library can read reporting from the slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The library’s holdings also include articles from Javier Valdez, the Mexican journalist who covered crime and corruption until he was killed by gunmen, as well as stories from Nguyen Van Dai, an exiled Vietnamese human rights lawyer and democracy activist whose blog is blocked in his home country. Reporters Without Borders worked with the creative agency DDB Germany and design studio Blockworks, which spent three months building the collection from more than 12.5 million virtual blocks. “The whole library has a download link that is censorship protected, so you cannot destroy it,” says Tobias Natterer, senior copywriter at DDB Berlin. “Everybody who downloads the library can then upload it again.” Data on users who access literature is securely protected from view. Since Minecraft players can be as young as 7, the project is a way for Reporters Without Borders to engage a new generation on the issue of press freedom. “Very quickly, game users come to understand that in the real world, there are very real consequences when information is censored or journalists are denied access to the truth,” says Anna Nelson, the U.S. executive director of Reporters Without Borders. Since it launched in March 2020, the project has reached more than 20 million gamers from 165 countries.