15 Jul GetFacts – Get Your Facts Straight!
15 Jul, 2019
What was the project about?
Get Your Facts Straight! project provides media literacy education through workshops about disinformation and fake news on social media to young people and their parents.
The aim of the project was to provide media literacy education to students and young people from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, as well as to their parents and/or grandparents. With the Coronavirus outbreak and the related proliferation of disinformation, the need for media literacy has become even more pronounced. In this context, the partners decided to open the training to young people and adults alike and allow anyone who is interested in learning the basics of how to recognise and tackle disinformation, to take part.
The training programme is 10 hours long and consists of three modules:
1) What is disinformation
2) Why are disinformation and propaganda vastly present on social media and how does social media make money.
3) How to recognise and react to disinformation
The pilot training activities were implemented mostly online due to Coronavirus restrictive measures between March-June 2020. They involved over 700 participants and across 7 EU countries. By finishing the training participants became more aware of the nature of the content they come across on social media. In particular, they learned to discern what is real, what is false and what are the commercial or political reasons that this misleading content is deliberately being published online. In other words, participants gained an understanding of what disinformation is and how to identify it online.
Our aim is to raise their awareness about these issues and, through accessible resources, give tools to educators to equip and empower citizens with the media literacy skills to tackle them.
A part of the project was also awareness raising campaign about disinformation and fake news on social media (Facebook, Twitter). It was implemented in 8 countries and reached over 1 million people.
Target groups
Young people and their parents/grandparents, as well as anyone interested in tackling disinformation and acquiring media literacy skills.
Project results
The main results of the Get Your Facts Straight! project is a Toolkit for trainers and educators which includes learning objectives, training outline, learning materials (open educational resources) and recommendations and lessons learned from the piloting of the training. Since the training was piloted during the COVID-19 lockdowns the project partners transformed face-to-face activities to online learning activities and the the Toolkit also describes this process and experience. The training activity (10 hours long) is split into two sessions to accommodate different needs and profiles of the target groups (young people and their parents/grandparents) The first 5-hour session is implemented separately for each target group while the second session is a joint one.
The Toolkit that has been translated to English, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, German, Italian, Latvian, Romanian and Spanish language and is available on the Get Your Facts Straight! website together with the Training Methodology Report that describes the development of the training outline and includes a list of categorized open educational resources (in 8 languages) used in the training and a piloting report that describes in detail how the project partners implemented training activities.
Project partnership also organized a Get your facts straight! social media campaign that was aimed at raising the awareness about disinformation and the threats to democracy, as well as about the media literacy opportunities that can help everyone to understand, avoid and combat the disinformation. Project partners published 273 (objective: 90) posts on social media platforms. The vast majority was published on Facebook (176), followed by Twitter (71) and Instagram (26). The campaign reached over 1.2 million people on three platforms (FB, Twitter, IG).
>> Learn about the project results in this post
PARTNERS
- ALL DIGITAL AISBL, Belgium – Coordinator
- Centre of Technical Culture Rijeka, Croatia
- Fundatia EOS – Educating for an Open Society, Romania
- Stiftung Digitale Chancen (Digital Opportunities Foundation), Germany
- European Association for Viewers Interests (EAVI), Belgium
- Colectic sccl, Spain
- Global Libraries – Bulgaria Foundation, Bulgaria
- Ventspils Digital Centre, Latvia
- Open Group Societa’ Cooperativa Sociale Onlus, Italy