TACKLING THE CHALLENGES OF GENDER STEREOTYPING AND DISINFORMATION FOR A MORE JUST SOCIETY

In the next two years, BISI will be part of the GenderED project. The GenderED Coalition aims to shed light on the phenomenon of gendered disinformation and violence in social media. The project, led by 4 organisations from Italy, France, Greece and Bulgaria, tackles the misogyny that underpins this online phenomenon, through two intertwined actions: educating and campaigning. With the project the project partners intend to raise the awareness of and empower social media users – girls and women who feel unsafe or attacked, but also boys and men – to react to gendered disinformation.

Given the political and technological threats to freedom of speech, the only way to tackle disinformation is to educate the users of the networks by developing their critical thinking; educate the police to assess the risks for the victims, and to educate young people to recognize and denounce gender bias. GenderED will build a Community of Practice that creates synergies among media and information literacy educators (civil society organisations representatives, teachers, librarians, etc.), gender experts and activists, human rights defenders, social media influencers and artists to campaign online to reverse the narratives on girls and women, debunking the false and misleading representations that stem from stereotypes deeply entrenched socio-cultural misogyny. To achieve its vision and objectives, the project partners will implement the following activities: i) conduct a mapping of the phenomenon of gendered disinformation across EU countries; ii) develop a competence profile and ad hoc training path for MIL Educators; iii) organize a EU-level Civic Hackathon to address gendered disinformation; iv) run cross-country media campaigns developed by the participants in the Hackathons, and in synergy with the Community of Practice; v) produce a MOOC of gendered disinformation available to MIL educators.