The Canadian Centre for Child Protection has known for a long time that big tech is the enemy when it comes to allowing child sexual assault material to spread, with Twitter being among the worst. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection asked repeatedly for changes to be made with no results, so the idea to go on the offensive instead of always playing the nice guy finally brought this issue to the masses.

Child sexual assault material (CSAM) is on mainstream social platforms that we use every single day. The same ones that connect us to friends and family, are also destroying the lives of children whose sexual abuse has been filmed, then shared and reshared. Over and over again.

And while all platforms are failing our children, the failures of Twitter are especially egregious. In fact, just last year there was an increase of 42% of child sexual abuse material being shared on the platform.

So how do we educate and enrage people with the truth of the enormous failures of Twitter to put pressure on the platform to do more. With no paid media budget, we needed to ensure this conversation spread to as many corners of the globe, making it unignorable for the platform.

Twitter boasts that a single tweet can travel the world in a matter of seconds. In fact, on their 10th birthday, they advertised that exact fact. So wouldn’t it be poetic justice that on their 15th birthday we use their own platform to criticize them with a tweet. Not just any tweet, but one that would travel across the globe as fast as the sexual assault \material that they allow to spread on their platform daily.

Tweets spread at alarming rates. In fact, on Twitter’s 10th birthday they publicly celebrated the fact that their tweets can span the globe in seconds. Yet, they accept no responsibility when it comes to child sexual abuse material being shared on their site.

Upon discovering that their 15th birthday was around the corner, we knew we could hijack the conversation and use the event to shift the focus for our purposes. With one tweet that’s encourage to spread, we could show the world just how important it is for Twitter to step in and stop the spread of child sexual abuse material on their site.

On March 21st, Twitter would be turning 15 years old. While it’s a fun age for most, for survivors of CSAM, fifteen years of Twitter represents enduring years and years of their content being spread, popping up over and over again on this public platform. With 15 years of no action and no accountability, it was the perfect time to give survivors a voice to share the ‘gifts’ that Twitter had given them year over year.

Four days in advance of Twitter’s big day, we released a powerful video capturing the collective voices and raw emotion of real survivors. The film begins by wishing the social media giant a happy 15th birthday. The tone then begins to shift as the survivors recount their own experiences at that age—the abuse they suffered and the lengths they’ve gone to try and get Twitter to remove their CSAM from the platform.

The four day campaign generated over 330 million impressions worldwide with coverage from Canada to the US and Asia. On Twitter alone, over 30 million impressions were generated with thousands of people sharing the #TwitterBirthdayPlea message, spreading far and wide - all without any paid media to support. Spreading around the globe, just as Twitter is famous for doing, messages of support came pouring in from over 30 different countries.

Weeks following the campaign the hashtag #TwitterBirthdayPlea and video are still being shared across the platform. Two weeks after the campaign broke, The Five Eyes (an intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States) invited the Canadian Centre for Child Protection to speak at a meeting concerning the global epidemic of CSAM online.