Think! Don’t Hate

Western Balkan (WB) countries' relationship is hardly loaded with recent history of conflicts. Hate speech is identified as ‘lubricant’ of all hatred and barricade of any further normalization and strengthening of cooperation between citizens. In practice, as it is clary states within EU reports for all WB countries but most recently Serbia (May 2019) and Kosovo (April 2018), hate speech and discriminatory terminology is present in the media and online, but often tolerated, rarely tackled by regulatory authorities or prosecutors. Existing policy systems are mainly focused on keeping the status quo and dealing with the consequences of extreme behaviour and not on prevention or countering. Nationalistic narratives are even being flamed every time that it becomes convenient for nationally oriented politicians. We see consequences of this every day: People attacking bakery of the citizen over photo; People burning Serbian products in Kosovo; people attacking each other in Montenegro over Church; putting stickers over N.Macedonia flag at cars in Greece etc. So we wonder if any benefit that we have from reconciliation can satisfy people who are emotionally “pumped” with this narrative? We believe not. Also, long term solutions will not be possible till we don’t start working on the roots and start countering narratives. We decided to start with young people as we believe that barriers will be easier to overcome with the new generation. Young people are the most active group in the digital world, 71% of 15-24, compared to 48% of adults (Kids in the digital world, UNICEF 2017). Young people are at the same time targets and creators of hate speech in virtual space. Young people showed their interest to engage with each other and we want to start from them. We believe it is not enough to have only efforts coming from NFE or only from formal education. This is why we want to include all and our Overall objective is to strengthen responses to hate speech and set the ground for continuous combating hate speech by educating its creators and key young leaders, champions of the change. We will focus on achieving specific objectives (SO): SO1: To analyze a social landscape, targets and sources of fake news and hate speech, as well as ruts of their narratives; SO2: To raise the capacity of identified youth organizations and stakeholders to develop alternatives and counter-narratives to hate speech online; SO3: To develop formal and non-formal educational approaches promoting critical thinking and participation in the creation of counter-narratives; SO4: To create a sustainable multi-stakeholder platform and support system for ensuring long term countering, neutralizing and preventing hate speech.