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Description
The project is aimed at reducing students'' confusion from conflicting information about the war in Ukraine. The main goal of the project is to promote critical media literacy and civic education. The envisaged key activities are: (1) The creation of "Truth Detectives" workshops and (2) A web-based tool called "Fake News Calculator" - an innovative software for technological assessment of information sources in the world wide web created specifically for the project. Specialized training for teachers on the topic "Recognition and verification of online disinformation" will also be implemented. For years, Central and Eastern Europe has been a battleground in which conflicts and opposition, anti-European narrative and nihilistic sentiments towards democratic institutions are fueled by means of propaganda. We aim to increase civic and media literacy to protect democratic values in the new technological environment. If at this moment we do not strengthen the filters of information and content, we will allow through the information war to lose ground in our general consensus of where we sit as a democratic community, even more people will turn against those coming from Ukraine, what institutions are doing and why NGOs are helping. The values exploration will outline the topics on which we have consensus and where the value gaps are, and so we will charge the second task, the discussion format of the Citizen Hitchhiker''s Club, as a space for debate concerning information warfare, threats to rights in wartime, and etc. From each discussion will be developed specific content publicist materials that we will use for social media campaigns. The last important activity was the organization of two trainings for activists and journalists to increase the capacity to avoid SLAPP cases. The specific target group of the project is the media and civil organizations, and the end users are people of active age.
Summary of project results
The war in Ukraine has acted as an accelerator of the disinformation reigning in Bulgaria and Central and Eastern Europe for years, and to the blurring of the general consensus on where we sit as a democratic society. The project addresses the division in society during the war, the negative attitude towards refugees from Ukraine and towards actions of the state and NGOs by increasing media literacy to protect democratic values in a technological environment.
A survey was conducted under the project to clarify areas of consensus and gaps in the values of society. 19 in-depth interviews and 5 focus group studies were conducted with a total of 46 participants from the capital, 2 regional centers and 2 small settlements. The findings of the survey helped to formulate fundamental topics for discussion, which are also often the object of active propaganda and disinformation. Some of those topics were discussed in the Civil Hitchhiker’s Club, among which the low voter turnout; demographics; the euro zone and the replacement of the Bulgarian National Currency with the euro as a means of payment; donation and charity; gambling advertising; children''s hospice in Bulgaria; the division in society, the problems of ‘The Monster NGO’; AI; the symbols of the nation, etc.
2 SLAPP trainings allowed 32 activists, journalists and students to get acquainted with the SLAPP cases, judicial practice and correct countering strategies.
During the project period the information on the activities reached 48395 people via the communications channels of the PP and 200 000 people via the media and the partner’s channels.
The project depicted clearly the consensus and the biggest controversies in Bulgarian society. The majority of the survey respondents consider the society goes apart from the basic democratic values. The analysis of the survey outlined the main issues that are subject to disinformation and propaganda. Those subjects were discussed with experts and citizens in the Civic Hitchhiker’s Club. Replays of the discussions were made available online for further use and as an additional source of information for the general public countering the disinformation in the traditional and social media in Bulgaria.
The anti Slapp trainings achieved synergy between different types of experts like journalists, judicial and legal experts, activists. The topics were reviewed from different points of view in order to achieve a better representation of the problems with those legal cases and to find out the correct strategies to overcome them. Those are one of the few similar trainings in Bulgaria but they are likely to become more and more important in the future.
AEJ''s participation as a partner in the meetings of the Citizen Hitchhiker''s Club enabled professional journalists to present to a wide audience an independent view on current topics, as well as the relevant key approaches to filtering misinformation and limiting propaganda.