As a response for the lack of free press in Ecuador and boost awareness for 4pelagatos digital positioning, we created MashiMachine, a website application that lets people create and share videos with words from the footage and audio that the Ecuadorian president has said in his official statements.

With this web app, Ecuadorians create and share unique videos that use President Correa´s voice and face, the only speaker they are officially allowed to hear.

This way, The President now speaks -in his words- things the people of Ecuador need and want him to say, not just the ones the government chooses for them. The platform allows the making of standalone and new videos easy and fast, and the new content produced by users is virally and socially shareable.

MashiMachine uses Ecuador's only official speaker, to give back a public voice to the people.

MashiMachine lives on mashimachine.4pelagatos.com website, with an interactive desktop/mobile deployment that allows the platform to be experienced anywhere. We used the hashtag #mashimachine in every shared post to viralize and track the user's interactions.

The website implementation works with custom made servers that provide service to an on-demand video editing platform, living on the amazon cloud that exposes a REST api which is consumed by the client application.

It took 2 months of development and video database population. New words are added daily to the database. It is placed as a standalone subdomain of the 4pelagatos journal which supports the platform by spreading social network awareness and daily blog posts about the MashiMachine.

Thousands of videos can be created by the hour, each portraying a different idea or opinion, each giving a familiar voice to new arguments. The voice of the president turned into an open source of free speech.

In just 72 hrs:

+110K Videos created by the people, enough to make 256 feature films.

+1.8M pageviews, one of the most visited sites in Ecuador.

+156M Social Media Impressions, the largest organic viral campaign in the history of Ecuador.

+4M USD in Earned Media, the world became aware of the problem.

+The MashiMachine became a platform of free expression where Ecuadorians regained a public voice.

MashiMachine has allowed users to create their own content in a political environment that needed to be challenged. People have appropriated the name, the brand, the character and the platform itself as a vessel for their own freedom of speech, their own channel for personal expression.

The open nature of the platform created an opportunity for emergent behavior. New ways of communication arose from it, aside from obvious political messages, we have seen the platform used to create remixed music videos, send Birthday wishes, promote events, make comedy sketches and even transformed into an musical instrument.

Our target was the Ecuadorian Civil Society regardless of their political views, people who are tired of not being able to freely speak offline and specially online. Indirectly, we appealed to all Ecuadorians, International audiences and the Ecuadorian government itself.

President Correa uploads 4 hours of video and audio of weekly updates to Youtube. We gathered material from them and separated each word to populate the video database.

The website has a prompt where people can write whatever they want and click a button. The president then says whatever they want him to say. The app returns a stitched-up shareable video and a website link that can be distributed easily and freely over Twitter, Facebook and Whatsapp social networks. These Videos may range from funny quotes to highly charged political statements, yet the platform invites people to speak freely with the President's voice.

In Ecuador there is only one voice that says it all, the voice of President Rafael "Mashi" Correa, he broadcasts publicly more than any other world leader (over a year long of footage in his term). His “Communication Law” monitors and clamps the opinion of journalists who oppose the government. Today they control the largest media group in the country, from one National media in 2008 to owning 22 in 2016. The New York Times called his attacks against the press "An Assault on Democracy".

In this context, Three top journalists, who were forced out of their jobs because of their opinions, got together in 2016 to open the online journal “4pelagatos” (the same word Correa used to insult them). They hired us to come up with an idea that would give Ecuadorians the opportunity to express their public opinions, boosting awareness for their platform at the same time.