Oxylabs’ Project 4β Named a Finalist at the 6th Annual Anthem Awards

Project 4β is a Finalist at the Anthem Awards for the second year running, this time in the Purpose-Driven Program or Initiative in Technology category at the 6th Annual Anthem Awards. Last year, Project 4β took home both a Silver Anthem Award and the Community Voice Award, the latter decided entirely by public vote, so this recognition feels especially meaningful. Out of more than 2,500 projects entered from around the world, our pro bono initiative was again selected among the year's highest-scoring work and is now in the running for a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Anthem Award, as well as the publicly voted Anthem Community Voice Award.

Recognizing Work Built for the Public Good

The Anthem Awards launched in 2021, created by The Webby Awards to honor the mission-driven work of people, companies, and organizations worldwide. The program celebrates impact across seven core causes, from Human & Civil Rights and Responsible Technology to Sustainability, Environment & Climate, and it has quickly become one of the most recognized benchmarks for social impact excellence.

Winners are selected by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), a panel of leaders from organizations committed to social change. Being named a Finalist means that, alongside thousands of other entries, Project 4β was judged to have helped set the standard for good this year.

What Project 4β Is About

A lot of the questions that shape our world are hidden inside public web data, from how disinformation spreads and how scam networks operate across borders, to how housing markets behave and where old-growth forests are quietly being sold off. The information is often publicly available, but collecting it at scale is a different story, with anti-bot systems, geo-restrictions, and constantly shifting site structures standing in the way.

Project 4β exists to take those barriers away. It is Oxylabs' pro bono program, and through it we give academics, researchers, journalists, NGOs, and non-profits free access to our public web data gathering infrastructure, scraper APIs, proxy networks, and the expertise that goes with them. The idea behind it is simple: the technology that powers global commerce should also power the research and missions that protect the public interest. Today, Project 4β supports more than 60 partner organizations worldwide, and their work is where the real story lives:

• Bellingcat has used our residential proxies to keep its Auto Archiver running, preserving more than 150,000 web pages and social media posts as evidence before they can disappear.

• Debunk.org combined our infrastructure with open-source methods to expose a coordinated scam network that impersonated authorities like Interpol and Europol, uncovering 50,426 ads and an estimated reach of 52.7 million people across Europe.

• Le French News Lab analyzed tens of thousands of French news headlines to study how political actors are framed in the press, building reproducible, public research tools in the process.

• Sengirės fondas (Ancient Woods Foundation) screened hundreds of forest-sale listings in just five weeks and already found one old-growth plot now entering the buyout process for permanent protection.

These are only a few examples, alongside partnerships with the Pulitzer Center, Global Witness, Follow the Money, FactCheck.LT, and researchers at Stanford, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, Warwick, and the University of Birmingham.