The goal of this Local Action from North Macedonia, focusing on checking objective reliability of information - was co-funded by TechSoup Europe and Metamorphosis Foundation, and implemented by Association Callidus. Main focus was to raise the awareness about the importance of Media literacy, and about the traps that every person, but especially youths aged 10-16, can fall into while using social media. The Local Action has also aimed to equip teenagers with know-how on how to identify different types of media and the messages they encounter online.

The other, major focus of the project was to engage more teachers in schools all over the country, so that they will pay more attention to what extent their students use social media, in what manner, as well as pay particular attention to teach them how to be more alert when using social media. The overarching ambition is, to make pupils better critical thinkers, or smart consumers who recognize the point of view anyone addressing information at them, and to achieve it thanks to the high-quality education system, that is up to speed with modern challenges. The teachers have received comprehensive Info Paks with ideas and videos, on how to teach students about the most important things about Media Literacy and also attached a Google Form Survey to enable teachers to let us know if they like the idea to implement Media Literacy in their lessons. With the activities that were part of the LP, we pulled the string to make teachers’ pay more attention to Media Literacy in class.

Before the videos were produced a short survey conducted amongst educators has shown that lacked information about Media literacy – 67% and 11% haven’t heard about it at all. But after reading the Info Pak about 90% of the respondents stated that they would rather use it and the videos to talk about Media Literacy on social media in class.

All in all, all the videos (available both in Macedonian and English) were watched over 5000 times on both YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

To sum, up this great initiative has significantly contributed to raising awareness to young people through social media about the importance of Media Literacy on social media. At the same time teachers's outreach has improved their perception of modern threats of disinformation, misinformation and how often they start flourishing from being spread in schools and beyond.

If you'd like to learn more about the work of Metamorphosis Foundation, our core partner, click here. For more insight and real tools to counter disinformation, try watching our webinar "Cheapfakes in Central and Eastern Europe Region + other major media manipulation threats". And, just in case you wish to learn more on "Cheapfakes" and how, by simply manipulating pictures, they have become an intentional, international propaganda tool, check out a blog post by one of our experts, Dr Dren Gërguri: "Cheapfake as a dangerous propaganda tool: the case of a refugee from Kosovo".

Background illustration: Photo by Slavcho Malezanov from Unsplash / Unsplash license