Social Blackout

Brief by Xavier Blais and Maxime Sauté
In essence: use Facebook and its parent platforms (Instagram, WhatsApp) to get more unregistered people to sign up and vote in the 2020 Presidential Election.

Problem

During election periods, Facebook and Instagram have become very popular amongst presidential candidates and voters. However, they are also filled with wrong and misleading information about the voting process and the candidates.

Insight

People have become more aware of how their opinions are manipulated, as such, they no longer fully trust what they see an online. Hence, not trusting their own opinions as they question the authenticity of their own thoughts.

Strategy

By getting people to reach unbiased information easily, people can learn more about the elections without biased and eventually, empowering them to become more politically conscious and active enough to vote.

Solution

Social Blackout

A day to educate voters without the background noise

How does it work?

During these 24 hours, any users that tries to reach Facebook or Instagram will be taken to a website called election.info.
A website designed to educate people on the election process, candidates, and the importance of voting.

Created by Facebook, election.info, will present all information of the election.

This includes information such as on the candidates’ backgrounds, their policies and their pledges; with citation to where they announced/shared the shown information. This way, election.info will act as a general unbiased education platform that also enable people to read more into the topic if they want to.

Simply put, this empowers users to take agency in their voting decisions by informing them about proposed policies and the voting process.

After these 24 hours, election.info will still be live and linked via shortcut buttons on home pages of Facebook and Instagram until the end election. With that, voters will have an unbiased website to refer to for any election queries — letting them get untainted and un-manipulated answers.

Election.info can go beyond the US and make people all around the world politically engaged.