Luna Nera is a Netflix TV series set in the XVII century: not a good time to be a woman. In the past, women were persecuted, called witches and sent to the stake.

But times change, right? Not really.

If women used to be burned in the streets, today hatred scorches them online with comments, tweets and disgusting posts.

To launch the first season in Italy, Netflix took the side of women by actually burning all the insults they receive every day on social media.

We decided to publicity fight online hate in the most spectacular, talkable and controversial way: creating a digital pyre in the middle of Milan’s most important square and on the web.

The fire of our pyre was fed by the thousands of comments, posts and tweets against women streamed in real time by an AI designed and trained to discover hate every time it popped online.

People were invited to extinguish all hate comments in real time from the pyre and from the web, forever.

The launch of the Italian Luna Nera series had to make sure that whatever experience we came up with, it had to be both memorable, instagrammable and a true help for women.

We decided to leverage on a social and relevant problem to announce Netflix's first all-female Italian series by making the news.

Five days before the launch of the show, Milan woke up with a modern pyre in the city center. Not only a piece of design but a pyre hosting an AI connecting the physical activation with the burning online word.

The 5 meters tall, 3 meters wide neon installation served as an attention-grabbing device. But the AI served a higher purpose. It enabled people to select and delete online hate from inside the pyre or from a dedicated website.

Comments were picked from the web by our AI and displayed in the pyre or on the platform. When a hateful word was selected, the AI found all comments containing it and reported it to the platform hosting them. In minutes the platform deleted the hate.

The more hate comments were deleted, the more the neon lights were turned off, to show how the fire of hate was expiring too.

The installation received 10 million interactions in only five days, becoming a tourist waypoint. In just a few days thousands of people took the square to delete insults.

Passer-bys shared a picture of the pyre, and a total of more than 234k reactions inflamed the public opinion and started a national debate.

The pyre also won the hearts of influencers that were on the receiving end of the online hate like Geppi Cucciari, one of the most persecuted italian comedians. Even the most famous italian dictionary supported the initiative.

The entire campaign resulted in effectively deleting more than 65% of hate comments from the web.