Building the foundations of our project: Global Media Literacy and Information week

Before starting our journey and begin developing our project we made a crucial stop. We celebrated, in our own way, a UNESCO initiative “Global Media Literacy and Information week”. The key goals of this initiative were to address disinformation and provide efficient strategies to identify and avoid misinformation.

Nowadays, social media have become vehicles of misinformation. We have a constant urge to be connected and share things with each other. We are, at all times, one click away from sharing something with the world. However, a simple share could have huge consequences and we have to carefully examine the information before sharing it. In addition, misinformation has managed to disrupt many sectors of social life, making it harder to tackle the world’s most pressing issues such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, the struggle for racial justice.

Following a multimedia approach, in order to honor Unesco’s cause, we decided to conduct extensive research to unveil how different channels address this cause. What we wanted to achieve was to obtain a deeper understanding of the issue of misinformation.

We discovered two initiatives aimed to combat misinformation that we thought were worth sharing with our colleagues. We considered, that it was essential to highlight their purpose and we promoted their cause via our personal social media pages.

1. Share verified

The share verified initiative

A United Nations initiative, that aims to highlight how we, as users of social media, have a great responsibility for spreading misinformation and fake news and how we can identify fake news and report it. It pinpoints that we are the only ones that need to ensure that the information that we share comes from a reliable and trustworthy source.

“Only we can “break the chain” of misinformation.”

➻ You can find more information about the cause here.

2. Take care before you share

A reminder to always consider the 5 W’s when you are about to share something

A United Nations initiative, that aims to highlight the importance of pausing and reflecting on the information before sharing it and how that “pause” can significantly help to reduce the spread of misinformation. The whole initiative is based upon creating a culture of pausing in order to reflect on the content before posting it.

“However, there is something we can all do. Pause. The simple act of pausing before you share interrupts our emotional response, it triggers a moment of critical thinking. ”

➻ You can find more information about the cause and sharable content here.

A post that we created in order to celebrate MIL Week and was shared on our social media pages.

Without knowing, we were already building the foundations of our project. Through our research, we learned useful strategies on how to distinguish misinformation and ways to report it whenever we come across it.

Another crucial apprehension that we obtained, was the necessity to examine information closely and pause before sharing it or including it in our projects…

…because, after all, valid research constitutes the foundation of a successful project!

➻ You can browse through our presentation for MIL celebration week here.

Alone Together Team members: GeorgiannaChondrou Despoina Fragou Angeliki Kyriazi Konstantina Papanikolaou Angeliki Valeri

Professor: Ms. Betty Tsakarestou