FREEYOU NEXT- Media and IA Literacy

FreeYou Next is a project funded by the European Commission under the Creative Europe call for proposals, whose goal is to raise awareness among young people about the daily use of social networks and data, to increase their awareness of these issues and to defend them from the risk of being manipulated, a risk they may run when using the Internet and digital tools.

FreeYou Next is based on the FREEYOU project-funded by the Media Literacy for All program-and its main outcome: a multilingual educational format for media and data literacy, aimed at teachers, educators and organizations working with young people.

In addition to MEET, participating in this project are GLUON from Brussels, INOVA+ from Matosinhos, Etopia. Center for Art & Technology – FZC in Zaragoza and Dataninja in Bologna.

Young people spend on average more than 4 hours a day on social media, which inevitably influence their perceptions and behaviors. On the Internet, fake news and deep fakes spread quickly, and the possibility of falling into traps such as sextortion or identity theft becomes an increasingly frequent problem. Many devices, moreover, continuously store personal data about every user: from name to date of birth, from GPS coordinates to the history of sites visited. It is necessary, therefore, to prepare the new generations on the dangers that can be incurred by an unaware use of the Net and other digital tools.

How, then, to identify content produced by algorithms? How to create memes that can be used to better inform people? How is data produced and used? These are just some of the questions the project will try to answer, involving more than 440 students from all over Europe. To do so, lectures on topics related to media literacy and co-creation sessions together with local artists will be organized. The intention of the project is to stimulate active participation in the digital world of young people, to counteract the passive fruition to which they have been accustomed.

The format of FreeYou Next is based on three themes:

– fact-checking (source checking)
– social media (circulation of viral posts and memes)
– artificial intelligence (deepfakes and synthetic media).

The project will exploit the potential of social media itself-through social media broadcasting-to reach as many young people as possible and make them active and aware creators of media content.