MICROSOFT, DROP ANYVISION was a 2019-2020 campaign led by Jewish Voice for Peace in partnership with MPower Change and SumOfUs and with the support of the Ban Facial Recognition coalition and the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions National Committee.
The campaign successfully pressured Microsoft to drop its $74 million investment in AnyVision, an Israeli facial recognition company whose software collects Palestinians' biometric data at Israeli military checkpoints and secretly surveils Palestinians' daily lives in the West Bank. You can read more about AnyVision and the background of the campaign on the microsite I designed and co-wrote.
The campaign gathered 75,795 signatures on a petition that was then delivered by JVP-Seattle members, allies, and Microsoft workers at a rally at Microsoft headquarters. After the petition and rally, Microsoft hired former Attorney General Eric Holder to audit AnyVision, committing to divest if the audit found that AnyVision’s surveillance of Palestinians violated Microsoft’s principles. The company's eventual divestment decision set an encouraging precedent for the tech industry and represented a landmark win for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
Working with JVP's Communications Director, I was the main storyteller and designer for the campaign. I created the campaign's visual identity and produced all of the visual deliverables — from social media graphics to promote the petition and educate people about AnyVision, to a microsite that told the full story of AnyVision's violations of Palestinian rights, to printed signs and banners held by protesters at the Microsoft HQ rally, to ads on either side of a truck that drove around Microsoft HQ, to photographs and a livestream of the rally that were then disseminated on social media. I was also very involved in the development of the campaign's messaging, particularly in the writing of the petition and the copy on the microsite.
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In designing the campaign's visual identity, I researched Microsoft and AnyVision's branding, the user interface of AnyVision's actual facial recognition software, and the look and feel of Israeli military computer labs where the software is used. The signature aspects of the visual identity became wireframe mesh superimposed on faces, corner-only borders reminiscent of camera focus, glowing typography reminiscent of a computer screen in a dark room, and a lime green/army green palette that somberly evoked AnyVision's complicity in Israel's high-tech military occupation.
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SOCIAL MEDIA GRAPHICS AND VIDEO
Process animation of the above graphic
PETITION DESIGN
PETITION DELIVERY AND RALLY
