From October 2017 to January 2018, students and teachers of the Ludwigshafen schools Ernst-Reuter-Realschule plus and the Berufsbildende Schule Technik 1 actively participated in the project “MEET”. As part of the “Safer Internet Day 2018” on February 6th, the 10th grade of the Ernst-Reuter Realschule plus and the 11th grade of the BBS Technik 1 presented the results of the workshops on opinion-giving and prejudice, propaganda and counter speech in the conference room of the Landeszentrale für Medien und Kommunikation Rheinland-Pfalz (Media Authority of Rhineland-Palatinate) in Ludwigshafen, Germany.
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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.
Mid-November, Iztok Šori from the Mirovni inštitut has carried out a pilot lesson at The Bilingual Secondary School Lendava, in the north-east of Slovenia.
Presently, the strategy for distributing the high fluxes of immigrants in Italy consists in scattering them throughout the territory as much as possible. Consequently, the problem of integrating groups of immigrants representing a non négligeable fraction of local populations is a very common one. The creation of new centers for hosting asylum seekers is entirely under the control of the Ministry of the Interior. The local communities have no official role in the process and their reaction to the setting up of new centers is mostly adverse.
A total of 6 Learning Scenarios are going to be tested in Italy, Slovenia, and Germany. The first one started in Ludwigshafen, Germany on October 24th, 2017 and will be carried out throughout November.
Are you concerned about racism and intolerance? Do you want to put forward a positive vision of interculturality? 
The MEET conference on 12 and 13 October in Ljubljana served to bring together the team of the MEET documentary project from 3 countries and to discuss the joint framework planning and its implementation.
“Populism and the Web: Communicative Practices of Parties and Movements across Europe” a new book by Mojca Pajnik & Birgit Sauer, MEET project partners. Analysing right-wing populist actors across Europe, their discourses and practices of online communication, it shows how social media is used to spread ideas and mobilize supporters, whilst also excluding constructed “others” such as migrants, Muslims, women or LGBT persons.
The educational organization Helliwood has been implementing a model project for “strengthening the network’s commitment to hatred in the network”, sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth.