Studies show that news videos, Youtube, and social networking sites are playing increasingly important roles as information resources for youth in academic, social, and private contexts. Youths’ levels of digital literacies, practices of online content creation, and general digital media usage affect how they search for, evaluate, and interact with information on the Internet. Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults. Youtubers have found important place to people information channel. Young people critical thinking about media issues is not so high and low-quality information may have too strong impact to their lives. There are some life hurting portals and groups influencing youth people initiatives in bad way and the most receptive youth are those whose critical thinking is low, they are more sensitive because of different life factors. The focus of this project is rise young people media awareness, critical thinking, healthy choices mentally and physically. The idea is to teach from peer to peer media usage skills and rise media critics. The way we will do is to integrate sport and healthy lifestyle to media initiatives, creating positive and healthy news in Youtube channel, we will create. In this channel we will create also short video lectures about critical thinking, values, healthy lifestyle, in parallel we organize workshops in schools and youth centres. Project "Healthy News" is international youth initiative carried out by youth groups from Estonia and Spain 1.09 2017-31.12 2018, 12 team members from each country. In this project Rõuge (Estonia) youth media skills and Sanlucar (Spain) sport and active life knowledge will be integrated into common activities - vlogbrothers in Internet, 3 min videoclips about media and healthy lifestyle, workshops in schools and youth centres, common final suggestion list in video. All these acvities will be organized in both countries. For experiences sharing and project management and activities planning there will be 4 transnational meetings during 16th month project period.
Since internet and social media has become a part in everyday activities of youth and most people in general, it's only natural that it may also be used to misinform and confuse society to achieve popularity or other gains. We set out to help people see through the messy cloud of fake news and other media that is causing trouble and lowering the quality of life for everyone. At first we started to educate ourselves and learn about all of the different types of disinformation spreading around. Once we had a clear image and were confident in our abilities to select the truth from the false we started to use digital tools to spread the knowledge to everyone around us in our local communities and also to everyone on the internet who stumbled upon our content. The main groups of about 12 youth from Spain and Estonia were very interested in the topics and came on board soon after we announced our goals of fighting fake news. The Spanish group is from a sporting background with the sports club of Sanlucar de Barrameda and focused on dealing with misinformation about healthy choices, mental and physical health, integrating sport with media and creating a positive image of our project. The Estonian group came from a technical and media background with it's Rõuge TV group. They helped spread the knowledge about using media tools and how to create videos that captivate the audience about different topics in the field of misinformation on the internet. Together the youth from both countries set out to complete their objectives of creating lots of videos and taking many photos with the intent to encourage fellow youngsters to also question all the media they consume on the internet and in the traditional media forms. Documenting the workshops and international meetings was very successful in involving the youth on our social media pages. Videos about healthy lifestyles and thinking critically about media gained a lot of traction in the viewer count, sharing and liking of the content and because they are available to be viewed free forever on the internet they will continue to do it indefinitely.