There are 70 million online gamers and over 200,000 cybercafes across Indonesia. Unfortunately, the place where gamers find entertainment has also become a hotbed for cyberbullying. Esports News Channel realised the problem and wanted to stop cyberbullying during gameplay. And here’s where we come in.

Introducing The Anti-Hate Keyboard. The specially reprogrammed keyboards swap toxic phrases typed out by bullies for sweet and encouraging messages for their fellow online gamers.

Research shows that bullying in online gaming contributed 70.5% of cyberbullying in the country. Every avid gamer has experienced in-game harassment at least once in their life. This has gone on for far too long. These keyboard trolls needed to be stopped. And we had the ideal solution—using their weapon of choice, the keyboard.

Using first-party data, we identified and extracted toxic phrases commonly used by bullies. We then reprogrammed the processor of the Quantum Mechanical Keyboards and synced the toxic phrases to the keyboard through QMK firmware.

On 3 Oct 2022, World Day of Bullying Prevention, the Anti-Hate Keyboards were given out to cybercafes across several cities. When bullies unleashed abusive attacks, their toxic phrases were swapped for sweet messages in the chatroom, e.g. “fck u!” is swapped to “love u!”, “go n die pls!” became “go n celebrate pls!” and many more.

To make the campaign more sustainable, we made the firmware an open source for everyone. Companies or the public can visit our website (www.antihatekeyboard.com) and download the firmware to fight cyberbullying for the betterment of society.

The campaign was picked up by the media positively. Ten million in Media Impressions were earned. Five hundred thousand toxic phrases were swapped in just the first month.