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Description
ROMEA has long been committed to detecting and refuting hoaxes and manipulations concerning Roma as well as refugees so that the public, including the Roma themselves, has relevant information. In the project, we will place emphasis not only on creating true messages that refute manipulations and hoaxes, but also on their dissemination to as many recipients as possible. The project will help to increase media literacy among our target groups through educational activities; they will learn to critically evaluate information and participate in its dissemination through social and other media.
Summary of project results
This project was very negatively affected by the coronavirus pandemic, which made personal contact with the target groups much more difficult, which was not desirable and we had to deal with it in some way. Activities that could be moved to the online space took place in the form of video conferences on the website. We see the problem of insufficient media literacy, especially among the younger generation, on a daily basis. Thanks to this project, it was possible to train a total of x young pupils and students, which is a great number considering the coronavirus pandemic, which was in the Czech Republic for the vast majority of the time of the project.
In the end, we managed to train a total of 548 young people in the field of media literacy, which is significantly less than was determined in the project, but we think that considering the situation that prevailed here, this is a good result. As a very positive impact of the project, we perceive that we observe young people who are more interested in what they read on social networks, for example. In the discussions with the students, we understood that most of them have some knowledge about fake news, but they do not know the term. We mostly encountered the fact that pupils and students remembered local cases of fake news connected with the Roma. Most often we encountered fake news published by ROMEA, for example that "the Roma have a free swimming pool in Most". There was hardly a single student in the Ústí Region who would not have heard this hoax. After being trained on what a hoax is, the students themselves started coming forward with reports they heard in their locality, which we think is a good indicator that we have given the students information about what a hoax is.
An indisputable advantage is also the fact that this information is passed on to young pupils by Roma high school and university students, who are also trained in deeper topics of the media world. At the beginning of the project, we set out to train 1,360 people, but given that schools were closed for basically the entire year of 2020 and most of 2021, or were only in a limited mode, and the principals did not want to expose us or the students to unnecessary contagion. Of the originally planned 1,360 people, we managed to train 548, which is not a small number considering the above-mentioned circumstances.