Positive Speech Action

The European political, cultural and social scene of recent years has been increasingly shaken by the rampant xenophobic and racist attitudes in daily and virtual life, other than by the continuous hate crimes and hate speech. Various national and European realities are studying this problem, especially concerning cyber hate speech, as a result of the expansion of digital devices and social media, not only among adults but increasingly among the new generations.
In the last ten years, we have seen a gradual and constant decrease in the age of access to the web and its various platforms, so much that we talk about Generation Z: a generation used to using various devices since the early years of life and with higher technical capabilities than previous generations. On the other hand, adults find themselves being sceptical about the use of social media by young people, but without having the tools to analyse and understand the potential of these technologies.
We are approaching a generation that has no adult orientation on how to use various technologies, neither by the family nor by schools, and fills this absence by addressing Youtuber and the various social influencers. These, in their turn, are young self-taught people who create content on the web, not always with to aim of spreading a message as to catch likes and followers.
This gap makes young people between the ages of 10 and 18 more easily influenced by diffuse prejudices and stereotypes and by the climate of European radicalization (e.g. religious radicalization, the spread of extreme-right movements). Consequently, there is a higher use of a discriminatory language against categories subject to stereotypes in everyday life and on the web and an increase in the number of victims of cyber hate in its various forms in this age group.EU Kids Online 2017 research reports that 31% of young between 11-17-year-olds say they have seen hate messages or offensive comments and 41% of 11-17-year-olds say they have seen hate messages or offensive comments. The same research shows that 58% of young people were unable to defend the victims of hate messages. The figure for victims is 6%, but it is still difficult to identify because of the feeling of shame that victims often suffer.The latest research conducted by Amnesty International, before the 2019 European elections, and the monitoring of illegal online hate speech reported to major social media platforms, at European level, showed that the main victims of hate speech are part of specific categories: migrants, refugees, gays, Muslims, Roma, women.
The impact of discriminatory messages is devastating both: individually and socially. For the individual, it damages the dignity of the victims and undermines their sense of security: often the speeches are dehumanizing and denigrating, and they reduce people to labels that compromise the psychological well-being and social adaptation of the individual. At the community level, hate speech relegates particular social groups to the inferiority, fuelling conditions that weaken the value of rights and freedoms of stigmatised people.
These hate speeches on the internet call for the liberty of expression that knows no bounds between criticism and offence and acquires their legitimacy from the spreading disinformation, that is from the sharing voluntary and not of fake news, and the feeling of impunity.
All this, as the NOHATESPEECH movement points out, makes the web an unsuitable place for communication, sharing and participation. It is essential to consider the educational value of online platforms, their use in various ways and functions, to offer young people the tools to develop a media knowledge, to the conscious and correct use of the content, as well as to the production of original and respectful messages.
At this point, we believe it is necessary to create an opportunity for exchange and sharing of practices among youth workers to raise awareness of the phenomenon of hate speech and to pool all the tools and skills to combat it. The strategies adopted in this direction focus on Media Education and they aim to ensure that Youth Workers can work with young people: to facilitate access to social awareness, to confront themselves with them and reflect critically on the different concepts related to diversity and inequalities on which they base the stereotyped and violent language.
General objective:
- Decreased number of hate speech victims among young people from 10-18
Specific objectives:
- young people consider the use of hate words as an unacceptable language on the web
- A decrease in the use of discriminatory social language