Description
While the discourse of Romanian journalists on minorities has improved considerably since the early '90s, it has now moved, in its more violent forms, to the comments section, which are only seldom moderated. Also, politicians continue to use hate speech to gain public support, the most common targets being the Roma minority, the Hungarians and members of the LGBT community. The objective of the project is to combat hate speech, especially online. The project is expected to increase the number of complaints regarding hate speech received both by national authorities and by online publications and to raise awareness on this phenomenon. An information campaign will be carried out in 6 local high schools and high school students will be trained to work independently to combat hate speech. Also, an online tool for combating hate speech will be developed and the first issues of an annual report on the phenomenon will be published. The project will benefit the targets of hate speech.
Summary of project results
The project was designed to help the fight against hate speech in the Romanian public space. During the '90s, hate speech in Romania had taken quite a violent form, particularly against the Roma, the LGBT community and the Hungarians. After a period of less hate speech that lasted more or less between 2000 and 2008, hate speech was once again present in the public space, even though in a far less violent form, except for the comments section in the online newspapers, where the situation was still rather bad. Perhaps the biggest problem was that virtually no decision maker or stakeholder was willing to support coherent measures to tackle the problem while at the same time taking into account the issue of protecting freedom of speech. Thus, the project raised awareness on the importance of combating hate speech, as well as to the activity of the institutions and stakeholders that can contribute to a responsible and hate-free public space. A group of more than 600 high school students were involved in activities aiming to make them aware of the need to combat hate speech and teach them how hate speech can be fought, mainly in the online environment. 28 high school students have formed a brigade of net-rangers to fight hate speech. The brigade wrote articles, helped monitor the internet in search for cases of hate speech and drafted press releases with support from the project team. The members of the brigade also made short videos on issues regarding hate speech, discrimination and intolerance and took part in debates carried out at two Romanian institutions with attributions to sanction hate speech, two newsrooms and one faculty for journalism and communication studies. An online app to report hate speech to journalists and newsrooms was produced and used by the net-rangers. But perhaps the most important product of the project was the first edition of the Annual Report on Hate Speech in Romania, which was launched with the help of a gala-like event. The research looked at Romanian legislation with implications on hate speech and the draft laws that might influence the phenomenon, analysed the activity of the institutions that are supposed to sanction hate speech, analysed self-regulation mechanism for the media and political parties and provided a summary of the most serious cases of hate speech and of the most successful actions designed to help grow tolerance in the Romanian society.
Summary of bilateral results