The Ideas for Europe (I4E) project aims to boost political participation by developing solutions for and with citizens living in peri-urban and rural areas. Discontent with politics and abstention is a growing concern in democracies, with more and more Europeans blaming democracy for their social and economic problems. This issue is particularly strong in peri-urban and rural areas, where the Commission warns that 40% of surveyed citizens feel left behind by society and politicians. Ideas for Europe (I4E) will aim at combating this issue by promoting European values and inviting the public to contribute their ideas.
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Within the Ideas for Europe initiative, Alliance4Europe has been organising online workshops tailored for international media literacy practitioners, lifelong learning advocates, civil society members, media experts, and journalists. These workshops serve as train-the-trainer sessions, to equip educators with cutting-edge tools to combat disinformation effectively. Throughout the sessions, participants delve into various key areas, including understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying the impact of disinformation on human behaviour, implementing strategies to disrupt and counter disinformation effects, and effectively mapping and categorising disinformation content, incidents, and narratives. The primary aim of the workshop was to give an insight into available data and expert-driven tools and technology that can be used to counter everyday disinformation across print and digital media.
The workshop aimed at creating a platform to understand the threat of disinformation, identifying best practices, and imparting sufficient knowledge for empowering a wider community that is capable of identifying disinformation in the media space and increasing their media literacy capacities. Additionally, thanks to this project and workshops we aimed at promoting European values by including participants’ ideas and giving them the chance to contribute and share their opinions while equipping them with tools to counter disinformation.Â
Workshops:
Our 2-day workshop ‘Who’s lying now? Identifying and countering disinformation’ attracted 186 participants from rural, peri-rural, and non-rural areas. These workshops were attended by participants originating from 27 EU and 25 non-EU countries, different age groups, careers, and educational backgrounds.
While not all participants already possessed prior knowledge on the subject of disinformation, everyone who participated showed equal enthusiasm and interest. Thanks to this, the workshops were able to foster dynamic discussions during which participants shared various examples of disinformation they had spotted in articles and media. The cases tackled during the workshop ranged from recent instances such as the Russia-Ukraine war to the coronavirus epidemic that witnessed large-scale misleading and malicious disinformation campaigns. Throughout this spirited exchange of views participants were introduced to the concept of disinformation, misinformation propaganda, and ‘cognitive security’.
During the breakout sessions, different ideas were shared regarding disinformation and its manipulative effects. In groups, participants learned about the DISARM (Disinformation Analysis and Risk Management) Public Editor.
The DISARM framework is used by global institutions, such as NATO, the US, and the EU. Public Editor, is an innovative world-changing tool for people to identify and label disinformation as they read through news articles. Thanks to these tools and the discussion in the breakout groups they were able to gain awareness of important topics in the EU.
The workshops concluded with participants sharing their perspectives on how learnings from these disinformation tools could be implemented in their daily lives within their communities.
Summary
To summarise, the workshops fostered valuable connections and mutual learning among participants, introducing them to the DISARM and Public Editor tools and the intricacies of disinformation. This collaborative experience united individuals from diverse backgrounds and nations, yielding a profoundly positive outcome. Throughout these workshops participants worked as a group, combatting the feeling of disenfranchisement by promoting European values.Â
Here are the core takeaways: The workshop was successful in bringing together participants from various backgrounds, from rural and non-rural areas. Participants learned how to spot disinformation and will be able to apply this skill also outside of the workshop, in day-to-day scenarios.
Ideas for Europe has received funding under Grant Agreement n.101081542, from the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) under the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme (CERV) programme.
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