Operation Trojan T-Shirt
A bold campaign that reached its target audience in an impactful and creative way.
Operation UnManifest was a cooperative effort from the online hacktivists, Anonymous. The campaign aimed to destroy the “manifesto” written by Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the July 2011 attacks in Utøya and Oslo, Norway. Breivik uploaded his violence-inciting, far-right manifesto online, asking would-be supporters to spread his violent ideology across the Internet.
In response, a group of anonymous online activists planned a well-organised act of digital disruption to bury Breivik’s “manifesto” at the bottom of search engine results. The campaign called for online users to deface Breivik’s manifesto and create altered versions that use humour to mock its author and discredit his violent ideology. These new versions were uploaded to the Internet, masked as the original. The stated goal was to “let Anders become a joke, such that nobody will take him seriously anymore”. Digital disruption was used to mock Breivik’s violent extremist “manifesto”, raising awareness among the general public about the issue whilst encouraging at-risk readers to second guess far-right extremism and its ideology.
