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Responsible Tik Tok and Instagram Use

2024-1-DE04-KA152-YOU-0002152442024Mobility of young peopleongoing
Countries: DE|RO|RS|TR|MK|IT · Grant: €43,144
Human rights and rule of lawDigital skills and competencesInclusion of marginalised young people

Objectives

Online bullying is one of those mass phenomena with effects that are not directly visible, against which there are no optimal defense strategies. Despite its magnitude, its severity often escapes public attention. Young people learned from their own experience what others' hatred towards them looks like, and the number of victims might be larger than known because the most traumatized individuals often refused to admit, sometimes even to themselves, what was happening to them. Adolescents thus begin their lives believing that society is a space of hatred directed against them, and the psychological and social effects of the phenomenon are severe and long-lasting. In recent years in Germany, the percentage of young people who recognized they had been exposed to cyberbullying increased to 60% (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1393586/cyberbullying-young-people-exposure-germany/). At the same time, four out of five teenagers under 18 in Romania said they had been targets of online harassment, according to a study published by Bitdefender. In Germany, there are increasingly more cases of online bullying among young people active on the internet in recent years, with cases where young people resorted to suicide due to the harassment they faced behind the screen. When we speak about Roma, online hate speech against them and online bullying against them, these numbers reached even bigger percentages. Recent reports from the European Commission highlights that among high school students, digital skills and education in this area is poor. This is because there is no interest in educating children and adolescents in this field, even though they have unlimited access to online platforms and spending a large part of their daily activities using technology. After more than 20 years of free internet access, the phenomenon of online harassment became more aggressive and present in the current socio-political context, especially in Eastern European countries. According to Comscore, the platform that measures online audience (https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/What-are-the-most-visited-social-media-platforms-among-Gen-Z), the highest percentage of Gen Z mobile internet users on a social app is on YouTube, with 84% visiting the app. This is followed by TikTok at 61%, Snapchat at 58%, and Instagram at 56%. According to our volunteers, many of the online materials had discriminatory and exclusionary messages. They came to us and proposed to use the same channels but to produce positive materials, teaching them how to do that. Having in mind the proposals we received from our volunteers who underlined the fact that they lacked the skills and knowledge to create educational materials (movies and photos) to be used in a positive way to fight/prevent online bullying, together with our partners, as a continuation of other projects in the field of online education, we wanted to promote, through this project, the fight against online harassment and hate speech through education and development of online and visual skills. The purpose of this project was to combat online bullying among high school students by raising awareness of the phenomenon of online harassment and hate speech using film and photography. The project was based on knowledge of general human rights, involving young people and increasing their digital literacy to reduce the phenomenon of online bullying, racism, discrimination, and social exclusion in their online interactions. For this, we used methods specific to non-formal education (awareness campaigns, exercises of creative and critical thinking, etc.) and qualitative social methods such as ethnomethodology (for example, media recordings, testimonies, social observation), and analyses of the content of a speech or message using movies. The project objectives were: To develop tolerance and understanding for the 42 participants, high school students, in order to combat discrimination and online bullying, during the 8 days of the exchange. To develop knowledge about online harassment methods (cyberbullying and cyber-hate) and the extent of this phenomenon, among the 42 participants from 6 European countries, during the 8 days of the exchange. To increase the degree of knowledge among the 42 participants regarding safety in the online environment, during the 8 days of the exchange. To develop the 42 youths' knowledge about photography and movie making for educational purposes during the exchange.

Project partners (6)