Get the Trolls Out is a campaign to combat discrimination and intolerance based on religious grounds in Europe.
Led by the Media Diversity Institute (MDI), with the support of 6 partners spread across Europe, the campaign Get the Trolls Out is harnessing the power of social media to disseminate innovative media outputs and generate dialogue in order to deliver a powerful counter-narratives against diverse forms of hate speech.
Get the Trolls Out, phase 1, was the campaign to combate antisemitism, while recently it has been continued to address all forms of religious intolerance, including antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Christian sentiments and associated attempts to turn public opinion against migrants and asylum-seekers.
Some of the most important objectives of the campaign are:
- Reducing and degrading hate speech, discrimination and intolerance based on religious grounds in the European media space;
- Challenging stereotypes, debunking extremist mythology and shaping public opinion by developing inclusive content and leveraging traditional and new media platforms;
- Empowering civil society organizations across Europe to identify and highlight intolerance and xenophobia targeting religious groups.
The campaign relies on media monitoring of anti-religious speech and discourse by public and other figures in traditional and new media. When the project’s monitoring efforts detect anti-religious speech in the media, project partners expose and counter them using the most appropriate mechanisms, such as articles, videos, blog posts, letters to and meetings with editors and heads of policy, as well as reporting hate speech to social media platforms. In order to debunk anti-religious stereotypes and give voice to personal testimonies and experiences, engaging forms such as videos or memes are used.
Some of the most important outputs of the project are Tips to Counter Hate Speech, set of advices on how to react on the online hate speech and Linguistic Self-Defence Guide, which explains the most common hidden linguistic mechanisms behind the antisemitic speech.
CIMU SEE thanks Media Diversity Institute for this post.
