According to the study “Breaking the chains of hate, weaving support networks: Young people facing hate speech online” , carried out by Fad and Madita.es within the framework of the “No More Haters” project, young Spaniards are very aware that on social networks they face some messages with an ideological and political charge at an early age, when they do not have the necessary preparation to assimilate them properly, or to distinguish some boundaries between what is acceptable and what is intolerable.
Furthermore, young people believe it is necessary to work on values and emotions. They feel the need to learn to think critically and work on developing their own emotional intelligence. They see digital literacy as important to be able to combat hate speech.
On the other hand, 34% claim to have suffered some type of abuse on the Internet or social networks («personal jokes that they do not like, acts of exclusion, insults, threats…») and 38.1% report having seen, in the last year, “pages where people publish messages that attack certain individuals or groups”, according to a study developed by the Reina Sofía Center on Adolescence and Youth of Fad, based on a survey of 1,400 young people between 14 and 24 years old.
EDUCATIONAL APP
Another tool provided by the “No More Haters” project is an educational app for teenagers and young people to identify hate speech and internalize the keys to combat it. It aims to empower them to become active subjects in the search for solutions and in the fight against hate by promoting processes that facilitate the identification of hate speech, overcoming prejudices and stereotypes, promoting intercultural dialogue and providing critical judgment tools for online interactions.
“No more haters. Break the chain of hate!” is a responsive web-application in Spanish and English. that allow users to recognize and respond to hateful situations and earn points for being correct. The games consist of guessing words related to hate, identifying misinformation, and being the protagonist of hate situations as a victim or witness to see how they react. It also includes a scoreboard and a hoax search engine to consult the misinformation that reaches them. It can be downloaded from the main platforms such as Google Play and App Store, and can also be played on the web at https://play.nomorehaters.es/.
The web application includes the option to play in classroom mode, for which a teaching guide has been designed to support teachers, including didactic objectives, offline and online exercises, and evaluation criteria. The teaching guide can be downloaded from the project website: https://nomorehaters.es/.
