Cybersmile's Modern Witch Trials, created by JOAN London in 2024, draws a direct parallel between the Salem Witch Trials and online mob justice to combat
ARCHIVECybersmile Modern Witch Trials Reframes Online Abuse as Mob Justice
Modern Witch Trials is a 2024 public service campaign by The Cybersmile Foundation, created by JOAN London and directed by Eliza McNitt, that draws a direct parallel between the Salem Witch Trials and contemporary online harassment to challenge mob justice behaviour across social media in the United Kingdom and United States.
The campaign launched on 5 February 2024, one day ahead of Safer Internet Day on 6 February 2024, as reported by cybersmile.org. Its centrepiece is a short film that opens on a woman facing a torch-bearing mob accused of witchcraft, then cuts sharply to a contemporary woman navigating the same ferocity through a smartphone screen. The transition is deliberate and disquieting. The film closes on a single declarative line: "Mob Justice Isn't New. It Just Got a Tech Upgrade." That message anchors the entire campaign's argument — that the mechanics of collective punishment have not changed in 332 years; only the technology enabling them has.
The Cybersmile Foundation directs audiences from the film to its own website, where resources guide people toward more productive and compassionate engagement online. Distribution was designed for maximum reach across two markets. In the United Kingdom, the film screened across all Pearl & Dean cinema venues in the weeks surrounding Safer Internet Day, as confirmed by cybersmile.org. Simultaneously, the campaign ran across social media platforms to reach audiences in the United States and beyond, extending its message into the broader digital community it seeks to reform. Born from the accelerating rise of cancel culture, the campaign insists that cyberbullying and social media retribution now affect anyone with a social media presence — not only public figures — and that building a more compassionate digital community requires naming that reality plainly. The Clapboard Score for Modern Witch Trials stands at 71 out of 100.
ARCHIVEThe Cybersmile Foundation operates in a landscape where online abuse and cyberbullying are measurably worsening across both the United Kingdom and the United States. According to Saferinternet Org Uk, 74 percent of parents and carers and 45 percent of children in the UK reported concerns about online safety in early 2024, with risks compounded by the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and emerging social media platforms. Only 32 percent of children and 42 percent of parents and carers surveyed had heard of the UK Online Safety Act at that time, per saferinternet.org.uk, underscoring how far public awareness lags behind legislative intent.
JOAN London's strategic insight cuts through that awareness gap by refusing to frame cyberbullying as a modern anomaly. Instead, the campaign positions online mob justice as a persistent human impulse that technology has simply amplified and accelerated. Tom Ghiden, Managing Director at JOAN London, identified the specific combination driving the behaviour: the anonymity of online life, the frictionless ease of digital response, and a cultural desire to perform empathy and social consciousness publicly, as cited by cybersmile.org. That triangulation gives the campaign a sharper diagnostic claim than most online safety communications, which tend to address symptoms rather than structural causes.
In the broader public service and online safety category, organisations such as the Diana Award's Anti-Bullying Pro programme and the European Commission's Better Internet for Kids initiative, as noted by antibullyingpro.com and impactreporthub.com respectively, pursue similar awareness goals but typically through educator-facing toolkits and policy advocacy. Cybersmile's campaign differentiates itself by targeting general audiences through cinema and social media with cinematic storytelling rather than instructional content, staking a position in the cultural conversation around cancel culture rather than simply cataloguing harms within the digital community.
Director Eliza McNitt shapes the film's visual and emotional architecture. McNitt is an Emmy Award nominee and winner at the Venice Film Festival, as documented by cybersmile.org, and her command of atmospheric, morally weighted imagery is evident in every frame of Modern Witch Trials. The film's 40-second structure demands economy: a torchlit mob, a woman accused, an ancient ritual of collective condemnation, and then a cut to the present day — the same woman, the same fear, a smartphone in place of a torch. The parallel is not metaphorical. McNitt renders it as literal and immediate, refusing audiences the comfort of historical distance.
Chromista produced the film, as confirmed by cybersmile.org. Chromista is the production company associated with Hollywood director Darren Aronofsky, known for Black Swan and The Whale, alongside producers Ted Robbins, Adina Birnbaum, Jeff Baron, and Scott Franklin. The involvement of that production infrastructure gives Modern Witch Trials a production quality unusual for public service advertising, lending the work the visual gravity of narrative cinema rather than the functional aesthetic of a campaign spot.
The campaign's lighting design earned specific industry recognition — a Gold Telly Award in the Lighting category for Social Video in 2024, as reported by cybersmile.org — which confirms that the cinematographic craft was not incidental but integral to the work's persuasive effect. The film's tonal contrast between the orange-red flicker of torchlight in the period sequence and the cold blue wash of a phone screen in the contemporary sequence is what makes the central argument legible without a word of dialogue. JOAN London and Chromista use production craft as rhetoric, allowing the juxtaposition of two visual worlds to carry the campaign's entire thesis about mob justice in the digital community.
Modern Witch Trials earned significant industry recognition in 2024. The campaign won 4 Gold Telly Awards across the categories of Social Responsibility in Social Video, Advocacy and Causes in Online Commercials, Public Service and Activism in Social Video, and Lighting in Social Video, as reported by cybersmile.org. It also received 5 Silver Telly Awards in 2024, per cybersmile.org, acknowledging excellence across multiple craft and strategic dimensions simultaneously.
No independently verified audience reach, engagement rate, or website traffic figures for Modern Witch Trials are publicly available beyond the award citations documented by cybersmile.org and clapboard.com. What the structural evidence does demonstrate is a campaign architected for measurable amplification. The Pearl & Dean UK cinema distribution placed the film in front of captive audiences in a high-attention context in the United Kingdom during the fortnight surrounding Safer Internet Day 2024, an event observed in more than 160 countries and territories according to Diana-Award Org Uk. The simultaneous social media release in the United States extended reach into a second major English-language market without requiring separate localisation, since the Salem Witch Trials carry historical resonance in both countries.
Tom Ghiden stated the campaign was designed to make people question whether vicious retribution is warranted or whether more productive ways to drive evolution exist, as cited by cybersmile.org. That behavioural ambition — shifting audience disposition rather than simply raising awareness — is a harder outcome to measure but a structurally more durable one. For a public service campaign with no paid media budget on record, the Telly Award haul across nine categories in a single year represents a credible proxy for industry consensus on its effectiveness within the online harassment and digital community space.
Modern Witch Trials is a 2024 public service campaign by The Cybersmile Foundation, created by JOAN London. It uses a short film to draw a direct parallel between the Salem Witch Trials and contemporary online harassment, arguing that mob justice has not changed in character — only in the technology that enables it across the digital community.
Eliza McNitt directed the film. McNitt is an Emmy Award nominee and Venice Film Festival winner, as documented by cybersmile.org. She worked under the Chromista production banner, the company associated with Hollywood director Darren Aronofsky, bringing a cinematic craft level unusual for public service advertising addressing cyberbullying and online abuse.
The campaign launched on 5 February 2024, one day before Safer Internet Day on 6 February 2024, as reported by cybersmile.org. In the United Kingdom, the film screened across Pearl & Dean cinema venues. It ran concurrently on social media platforms to reach audiences in the United States and the wider digital community.
The campaign won 4 Gold Telly Awards in 2024 across Social Responsibility, Advocacy and Causes, Public Service and Activism, and Lighting categories, all in Social Video or Online Commercials, plus 5 Silver Telly Awards, as reported by cybersmile.org. The Lighting Gold specifically recognised the film's cinematographic craft as central to its argument about online mob justice.
JOAN London used the Salem Witch Trials to argue that mob justice is not a product of digital culture but a recurring human impulse. Tom Ghiden, Managing Director at JOAN London, cited anonymity, ease of response, and performative social consciousness as the specific drivers of online harassment, per cybersmile.org, making the historical parallel structurally precise rather than decorative.
The campaign positions cancel culture and cyberbullying as a continuation of historical mob justice rather than a novel digital phenomenon. It directs audiences in the United Kingdom and United States to The Cybersmile Foundation's website for guidance on more compassionate online engagement, framing the digital community's challenge as a behavioural problem with solvable, human-centred responses, per cybersmile.org.
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