Young people spend more and more time online. The use of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter is an integral feature of their daily routine, and social media has become their primary source of information and entertainment. At the same time, it has become alarmingly easy to stumble into online content spreading hatred and calling for violence. To address this risk, the EU research project CONTRA is launching a preventive program against radicalization through propaganda on the Internet. By raising young people’s awareness about the content of hate messages and propaganda, youth can be empowered to recognize manipulation attempts and question them.
CONTRA is based on two previous projects – “The Impact of Extremist Propaganda on the Internet” and “Conducting a Media Psychology Survey to Analyse the Effects of Counter Narratives on the Prevention of Islamist and Right-Wing Extremist Propaganda”. The project consortium consists of a pool of highly qualified researchers and experienced practitioners. In addition to the University of Cologne and the University of Mannheim, the Terrorism / Extremism Research Unit (FTE) at the Bundeskriminalamt (Wiesbaden), the organization “UFUQ” (Berlin), the Federal Agency for State Protection and Counterterrorism (BVT, Vienna) and the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV, Den Haag) are members of the project consortium.
The MEET project partners are invited to participate at the two-day conference of CONTRA, which will be held in Cologne (Schloss Wahn) on February 22-23, 2018, to discuss “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Radicalisation, New Media and Education”.
