With the development of the Internet, new forms of bullying keep cropping up, causing even greater harm. Realizing that traditional campaign methods were futile, Taiwan's Ministry of Education gave up its conservative style, instead skilfully using the new media to mobilize the public to take a stance against bullying and to shape public opinion to build broad support for education reform and exert pressure on responsible government agencies to devise better policies.

In the past, the MOE’s printed campaign literature was mostly directed at bullies. Since it contained mainly moral appeals and persuasion, it did not produce tangible results. We wanted to reorient the focus of the anti-bullying campaign away from the victims toward the entire people, to let the campaign spread beyond schools to reach all spheres of society and make society aware that “Bullying is a problem that requires our constant attention, it can happen to anyone, anywhere.” Our goal was to bring the issue out into the open and use the shared experience of Taiwanese during their school careers to make the general public understand that unless we resolutely oppose bullying, diversity in our society will be under threat.

For easier identification, Taiwanese schools require school uniforms to be embroidered with a student’s name but we chose offensive, hurtful nicknames instead. No matter whether someone is already a member of the workforce or still a student, they can all recognize the meaning of this visual cue at first glance. We broadened the campaign even further by letting members of the public create their own uniforms online to tell their personal bullying stories via social networks. The high degree of public participation eventually increased public trust in education reform and the entire education industry.

The more people put up with bullying, the more powerful the bullies get. To build buzz for the campaign, we needed the bullying victims and the silent majority on the sidelines to be willing to take a stance. Name calling therefore seemed to be the form of bullying that would evoke the most sympathetic responses. Virtually everyone in Taiwan has been a victim of name calling. Therefore, we opted to use school uniforms as a medium to unite people behind an anti-bullying stance as every person would tell their own story through this uniform. In Taiwan, school uniforms are a symbol that is understood across generations and different communities and can be featured through videos, photographs or influencers and people responding to the campaign wearing their actual uniforms. In the end, we successfully triggered debate about the issue on different social media platforms and built consensus through these stories.

We published a post titled “Help find the uniforms’ owners” on Facebook to let it spread on social networks – When eight key opinion leaders outed themselves as the owners on their own social media pages a few days later, the younger generation began to share these posts and our campaign videos, helping them to go viral. Earlier we had sent school uniforms to Internet opinion leaders and entertainers from TV and film, embroidered with the nicknames they “wore with pride”. As one after the other received their uniforms, they responded by voicing their support. We also released a uniform chatbot on Facebook which more than 10,000 Internet users used to create pictures of uniforms embroidered with the offensive names they had been called in school. This action allowed people to demonstrate their opposition and resistance against bullying by telling their own bullying stories.

More than 30 media featured the project in reports. We only spend money to buy the uniform shirts that we had embroidered and swapped resources with 70 celebrities and influencers to obtain 70 bullying stories and earned media value of nearly 300,000 Euros, ultimately reaching 8 million impressions. We successfully raised awareness about bullying among the people in Taiwan. The stance against bullying also translated into support for education policies, leading to renewed attention to and affirmation of education reform and related draft legislation under way in 2019.