The main goals were to increase awareness, skills and resilience of youth when navigating their social media worlds. By collaborating across Europe, the project hoped to create innovative tools to teach critical thinking and reduce the polarization caused by personalized feeds and bubbles. To raise knowledge and digital skills of young people, and teach them how to navigate and not be overly influenced by social media bubbles. To promote contextual thinking among young leaders and influencers fighting misinformation online. To gain understanding of how social bubbles work and use that to create educational tools to protect youth from their impacts. To build an interactive online platform where youth can check their "social bubble profile" and learn how to benefit from online spaces while avoiding pitfalls. To exchange research and best practices between organizations in different countries to address this issue affecting youth across Europe. To create trainings and an engaging web application to inform youth of "bubble vulnerability" and mitigate negative behavioral impacts. To foster critical thinking and media literacy in youth to counter manipulation by their own filter bubbles and echo chambers.
The project aims to address the rise of fake news, disinformation and polarized social media "bubbles" that are dividing and influencing youth. Research shows a growing "post-truth" environment where facts are unclear, benefiting extremist agendas. COVID-19 exacerbated this by creating an "info-pandemic". The project aims to debunk dangerous social media bubbles through innovative learning tools. It is based on prior research into youth vulnerability to online bubbles. The project will design trainings to empower young leaders to combat fake news and promote factual thinking. A key output is an interactive web app to showcase "bubble vulnerability". Overall, the project seeks to raise youth awareness, digital skills and critical thinking to counter online disinformation. Creative learning methods will build contextual thinking and skills to navigate their social media world. The project wants to equip young people, especially leaders and influencers, with the awareness and capabilities to counter the polarization fueled by manipulative social media. Collaboration between European youth organizations will create tools to promote media literacy and positive online behaviors.