Online hate speech is a growing problem. People often experience the internet to be a hostile space. Hateful messages are increasingly common on social media. To complement existing initiatives to regulate, monitor or report online hate speech, a more pro-active answer is clearly needed.
SELMA (Social and Emotional Learning for Mutual Awareness) is a two-year project co-funded by the European Commission which aims to tackle the problem of online hate speech by promoting mutual awareness, tolerance, and respect.
The overall vision of the SELMA project is captured by its catchphrase: Hacking Hate. It builds upon a Social and Emotional Learning approach to empower young people to become agents of change; it helps them to better understand the phenomenon of online hate; it provides them with tools and strategies to act and make a difference.
Our role in SELMA is to produce the SELMA toolkit - a collection of activities, resources and lesson plans aimed to support teachers and those working with young people aged 11-16 to understand online hate speech, the impact it has on a person, a peer group and society as a whole and help build strategies to disrupt hate speech online.
We are working with our project partners in Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Germany and UK to make this toolkit useful and simple to use.
Coming soon!
If you are interested in the toolkit or the project overall, get in touch.
"Hacking is any amateur innovation on an existing system, and it is a deeply democratic activity. It's about critical thinking. It's about questioning existing ways of doing things. It's the idea that if you see a problem, you work to fix it, and not just complain about it."
Catherine Bracy, TechEquity Collaborative
