The birds versus the dictators

French international news channel France 24 highlighted the power of internet freedom in Birds, a campaign inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds. The print and outdoor campaign featured a Gaddafi-like dictator and other powerful figures threatened by a flock of blue birds, echoing the Twitter logo birds.

Three posters, emulating the style of the original 1963 Birds movie posters, feature Gaddafi, Mubarak and Ben Ali.

Online social networks played a significant role in spreading revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya earlier in 2011. France 24's Arabic language version broke all audience records during this period, and the channel as a whole has benefited from an increase in audience.

Coverage of Arab Spring brings success

In March 2011 france24.com experienced a peak in traffic with nearly 14 million visits and about 59 million page views. The channel's Twitter following grew quickly due to a large amount of tweets dedicated to the Arab Spring topic.

The channel has also been very successful on Twitter thanks to its intense coverage of the Arab Spring, with a large amount of tweets dedicated to the topic, which enabled the channel to quintuple the number of followers of its Twitter account since the beginning of the year.

Based on these exceptional results, France24 and its agency Marcel have decided to highlight the link between freedom of information and freedom of expression on Internet.