A contact-making seminar on Youth Work vs. Euroscepticism was held in Iasi, Romania, from 7th to 16th September. Representatives of the event were 9 countries – Bulgaria, Romania, Spain, Slovenia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, North Macedonia, Croatia. The coordinator of this event was Kasta Morrely.
The focus of the event was to share the reasons why and how Euroscepticism manifests itself and its impact on the relations between different nationalities. A similar problem was found between all of them, and that was fake news and the distortion of historical facts to build tension between different nationalities.
In this regard, the participants were divided into several working groups in order to be able to find solutions to the identified problems. The common problems of fake news, disinformation, can be tackled by following basic strategies that have been put in place to reduce the likelihood of reading manipulated information.
These are:
1. Verification of specific information from at least 3 sources, one of which is a paper on local media, which has transmitted facts from what happened.
2. Communication with representatives from a given region to check the events and break the prejudices towards a certain nationality.
3. Participation in Erasmus+ programs to broaden the worldview of the participants in order to ensure a better understanding and continuity of differences regarding the culture and history included in educational institutions.
The changed situation due to COVID-19 has shown an increase in mental illnesses and disorders in young people. Therefore, one of the working groups is concentrating its work on developing an Erasmus+ project to help young people in this direction.
Attention was paid to the new Erasmus 2021-2027 program, which focuses more on capacity building and providing more opportunities for the development of newly established NGOs. If you have an organization and an idea of what you want to do in your local community, together with partners from other countries, the application procedure is open.
Another topic that was raised was the proper use of the media, whether offline or online and their impact on society. The need for youth organizations to gain more knowledge and experience in creating materials for the media was noted: videos, posters, articles, and radio recordings. Therefore, the participants in the seminar were divided into groups in which they worked using the method K.I.S.S. – Keep It Short and Simple to create the above materials. Good resources that you can look at in connection with the media algorithms for cognitive hacking of people are this documentary “The social dilemma” and this short video with information about the methodology that social networks use.
