Resilience against Disinformation & Hate Speech

How to deal with populism? Which measures help against disinformation and hate speech? How can we increase the resilience of our society by having better strategies in hand to respond to the challenges of the digital information society? futur eins helps journalists, politicians and citizens and provides them with concepts and tools on how best to deal with populism and disinformation.

»The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction true and false no longer exists. « (Hannah Arendt)

Contact person

Alexander Sängerlaub

Christina Dinar

The dark side of the digital media worlds is clearly the many possibilities to play out channels and ways of disinformation and to spread them with great reach. It is not only the social media platforms that make it difficult to assess the quality of sources, not only because "likes" or "followers" are not good indicators or the algorithms do not curate according to quality or truthfulness, but also because classic media are finding it increasingly difficult not to fall for disinformation by populist politicians. What is gladly forgotten: Disinformation is part of the communication strategy of populist politicians or right-wing extremists. Like boulders, they block our public discourse and also take topics and truthfulness out of the daily media agenda.

It is worthwhile to strengthen the resilience (= resistance) of society. This applies to political public relations as well as to journalism or the news competence of citizens, because anyone who is involved in the democratic communication process can become a gateway or disseminator of disinformation.

In workshops and seminars we help society to increase its resilience towards disinformation. So far, we have advised members of the European Commission, the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany as well as editorial offices in Germany and abroad or civil society organizations on what strategies are promising in dealing with disinformation, what role debunking plays or what monitoring can look like.

Further topics

#01

Public Welfare Oriented Media Policy

A media order that emphasizes the remoteness of the media from the state, seeks to secure diversity, protects public-law systems from market power, and seeks to prevent monopolies of opinion as well as economic cartels is still a good foundation for a modern or even technically revolutionary media world. We think future-proof concepts that protect and further develop this foundation.

#02

Next Generation Social Media

The first age of social networks was a gigantic global success with a new form of human interconnectivity and communication, but also dark underbellies of destructive disinformation and propaganda. What can we learn from the first age, about business models, blueprints, algorithms, and echo chambers, and do better in the next?

#03

Digital Knowledge Architectures

Digitization offers completely new opportunities for knowledge processing and networking that we as a society can use. This also means leaving the attention economy behind and, for example, placing strategic social megatopics on resubmission. To achieve this, science and journalism need to move closer together to think in terms of joint information platforms.

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