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Fighting Fake News

2020-3-UK01-KA105-0944002020Youth mobilityfinalized
Countries: UK|HR|HU|TR|EE|IT · Grant: €25,425
Civic engagement / responsible citizenshipEthics, religion and philosophy (incl. Inter-religious dialogue)Social/environmental responsibility of educational institutions

Objectives

With the development of technology, phones have become a small computer. Social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter have become popular among people with the output of smartphones. However, although smart phones and social media have many benefits, their losses have also emerged. People have seen an event, a photo or something that can be shared to millions of people per second, and this has created the concept called ‘’Citizen Journalism’’. Each individual, like journalists, has been able to share an incident he has seen or encountered on the street, such as news, which has led to the possibility of causing a large amount of information pollution. 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. As a young generation, we all have been exposed to these false reports on social media, and we may even have believed in one of them. The European countries are also subject to the ‘’Fake News’’ disaster. In the University of Oxford Reuters Institute’s ‘’Digital News Report 2018’’ which 37 countries attended and proportion that trust most news most of the time is %40 in the UK. According the this report Turkey as a country that suffered most compared to 49% disinformation has topped the list. Among the European Union countries, Greece is with 44% followed by Hungary with 42% and Italy with 38% about ‘’Fake News’’. When we look at the countries where disinfection is the least experienced, Germany and Denmark stand out with 9% and Netherlands with 10%. According to the same study, 50% of the people with the most counterfeit news are using Facebook as a means of news. When we look at the rate of disinformation in the counterfeit news area and the rate of news reporting on Facebook, we can see how these two events are related to each other. The survey we conducted at the local level revealed how much this is needed. In the survey, 80 people were asked to reach the correct news-lies and to reach the right news, but 53 people use the social media as a tool to reach an up-todate news. Considering the existence of an unconscious young population, it is thought that the right use of the media and the right news is an important need. In this context, we decided to carry out this project due to the increasing number of counterfeit journalism and the high rate of disinformation in our country. Our general goal was to raise awareness of these false news in social media by informing young people about the right and wrong news, and to develop awareness of researching the accuracy of news against the news they see on the internet. Our specific objectives were: 1) Creating awareness on ‘’Fake News’’ concept. 2) Instilling research awareness against the false news they encounter on the Internet or in life. 3) Showing article writing processes to young people with visits to agencies and local news agencies. 4) While teaching the concept of ''Fake News'' to people on the street with various practices, enabling young people to be familiar with this concept and talk about this concept.

Project partners (6)