Unwanted Film Festival campaign begins
By Adnews Staff
Winnipeg-based charitable organization the Canadian Centre for Child Protection has begun a new campaign called “The Unwanted Film Festival” to raise awareness of the issue of online child sexual abuse material. According to the organization, the campaign is intended to convey that the amount of this material comprises more content than that of all the film festivals in the world combined. It consists of a website at <http://www.unwantedfilmfestival.com>, an online video in the style of a movie trailer and a two-day promotion in New York to coincide with the recent Tribeca Film Festival.
The creative consists of 85 million movie-style posters, generated by AI, representing each piece of child sexual abuse material reported in 2021. The posters are displayed in the five most spoken languages around the world: English, French, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish. Posters in German will be added when the campaign moves to the G7 conference in Germany. The effort will conclude at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall.
“We are now paying the price for decades of neglect and inaction from tech companies around the world, which has cost countless victims and survivors their safety, dignity and privacy,” said Lianna McDonald, executive director of the centre. “‘The Unwanted Film Festival’ is a global wake-up call about the failures to adequately address the festering CSAM epidemic on the Internet.”