Oppressive regimes spare no effort to shut down journalism that is inconvenient to them. While technology enables freedom of speech, it can also enable control.
After Saudi Arabian operatives carried out the gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, the kingdom doubled the number of websites it was censoring, according to the tracker Censored Planet. In Vietnam, ranked 176/180 on the Press Freedom Index, websites critical of the government are blocked. In Russia, a blanket ban was initiated on foreign VPN software that could bypass internet filtering.
In a bid to subvert press censorship, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has built a digital library of banned journalism within the world’s most popular video game—Minecraft.
The block-based sandbox video game, described as ‘Digital Lego’, lets you build anything in a randomly-generated world. It has over 145 million active players a month and is the best-selling video game of all time.
Available as a downloadable map, the ‘Uncensored Library’ is made up of 12.5 million blocks and is located on its own island within the game.
“In many countries around the world, there is no free access to information,” says Christian Mihr, managing director, Reporters Without Borders Germany. “Websites are blocked, independent newspapers are banned and the press is controlled by the state. Young people grow up without being able to form their own opinions. By using Minecraft, the world’s most popular computer game, as a medium, we give them access to independent information.”
Those featured include Khashoggi, who wrote against media oppression in Saudi Arabia; Yulia Berezovskaia, an exiled journalist who runs a news website that is banned in Russia; Nguyen Van Dai, a Vietnamese human rights lawyer whose writings led to him being imprisoned; Javier Valdez, who was murdered after covering the drug cartels in Mexico; and Mada Masr, one of Egypt’s few independent news outlets.
The library’s dome features the world map with each country colour-coded to its ranking on the Press Freedom Index. The featured articles are embedded into collectible books placed in their own chambers, with each country getting its own art installation and design. For instance, Saudi Arabia’s section has Khashoggi’s articles in a cage to represent the surveillance and detention of journalists in the kingdom.
For now, the library has only a few articles (the towering bookshelves are for show), but RSF has said it would add more. It is not easy to read within the game, given the pixelated design.
While the map could grow into a difficult-to-censor library with time, it could also lead to authoritarian governments banning Minecraft entirely. But, even if they do, would not the Streisand effect make it more popular?