Empowering youth to critically analyse fake news Erasmus Project

Project Title

Empowering youth to critically analyse fake news

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

The diversity of news distributed via social media communication channels exposes citizens, especially youth, to large scale disinformation including misleading and false information. Propaganda, misinformation and Fake news have the potential to polarise public opinion, to promote violent extremism and hate speech and, ultimately, to undetermined democracies and reduce trust in the democratic processes (Council of Europe, 2018). The main problem identified by project partners is the reduced level of commitment of youth in evaluating social media news. With this in mind, we aim at empowering youth to evaluate fake news and detect disinformation campaigns across social networks.

Trying to find a solution for this problem, the project team discussed with youth and identified a clear need for analytical and critical thinking skills improvement. Upon evaluating internal capabilities, partners agreed that confronting ideas and exchanging good practices in a European context will offer to youth workers a toolkit to address youth needs. The toolkit will comprise a collection of non-formal methods and techniques for improving youth critical thinking skills and analytical abilities. These will also contribute to consolidating the internal capabilities of youth organizations to support youth.

During the 2-year lifetime, we will exchange and test good practices to improve the internal methods in a European context. The consortium is formed by organizations from Romania, Spain, France, Italy and Poland with a similar goal of supporting youth and complementary competencies: non-formal education, media literacy, awareness campaigns, teaching methodologies, quality assurance. 10+ associated partners will contribute to reaching the target groups, implementing project tasks and supporting the dissemination. The multi-disciplinarity is expected to create a motivating context for staff development for achieving the main objective: “enhance the capacity of youth workers and youth organizations in their support for young people to interpret, analyse and evaluate the Fake News”. We identified three target groups that can contribute to addressing the aim of the project:
• TG1 – Youth (between 16 and 29 years) with active accounts on social media, with interest in developing critical thinking skills.
• TG2 – Youth workers, working with youth in all form of education, with interest in developing competencies needed for empowering the youth for dealing with Fake news.
• TG3 – Youth organizations, working with youth in all kinds of education with interest in developing their internal capabilities for addressing youth needs for dealing with Fake news.

The three specific objectives will provide the context for achieving the main objective:
• Specific Objective 1: Enhance the capacity of 25 youth organizations to appropriately empower youth for dealing with Fake news, in 4 months.
• Specific Objective 2: Improve the level of key competences of 50 youth workers in formal and non-formal education to adequately contribute to the youth critical skills development.
• Specific Objective 3: Increase the degree of interest of 250 young people from partners’ countries to identify, analyse and evaluate the Fake news, in 5 months.

The main results of our project are:
• Cooperation mechanism developed for sharing and debate on best practices for dealing with Fake news;
• Collection of improved methods and techniques for dealing with Fake news;
• Good Practice Guide for youth organizations, validated by target groups;
• Increased capacity of youth workers to operate at transnational level, share and confront ideas, practices and methods for dealing with Fake news

Short term benefits include
• Improved professional competencies and transversal abilities of youth workers for counselling the youth;
• Increased skills of youth to better understand how to interpret texts, and empowered to use critical thinking skills to fight manipulation;
• The consolidated capacity of youth organization to address youth needs.

On the long term, we expect better social inclusion of youth in society and qualitative development of youth work to strengthen democracy and fight manipulation, propaganda and fake news. At the organization level, it is expected to strengthen cross-sectoral cooperation between youth organization. Increased participation of youth workers in societal actions being motivated by the improved non-formal educational practices.
By the end of the project, the aim is that the good practices and the collection of improved methods and techniques for dealing with fake news are sustainable and will be taken up by more education institutions all over Europe. This will allow them to empower youth to evaluate fake news and disinformation campaigns across social networks. The approach is scalable and provides clear benefits for the participating youth and institutions, while at the same time being cost-effective due to the use of virtual collaboration.

Project Website

https://trainingclub.eu/fake-news/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 64788 Eur

Project Coordinator

Asociatia TEAM 4 Excellence & Country: RO

Project Partners

• SOLIDARIDAD SIN FRONTERAS
• CEMEA Rhône-Alpes
• FUNDACJA INSTYTUT BADAN I INNOWACJI W EDUKACJI
• Petit Pas aps