"Don't Be Silent" is a campaign against online hate speech and shows what every individual can do against it. The student team won the "Peer To Peer: Facebook Global Digital Challenge 2017" with the campaign.
The initiation for the project which Prof. Katrin Androschin launched together with her students from the M.A. Strategic Design and M.A. Marketingkommunikation programmes was the "Peer To Peer: Facebook Global Digital Challenge", an international competition for universities that aims to combat hate speech in social media with innovative communication concepts. "Don't Be Silent" aims to tackle online hate speech and encourages the silent majority to speak up and take action.
The project team has developed various techniques to put a stop to hate speech both on- and offline. These include activities at Berlin universities or workshops that show what hate speech is and what can be done about it. Media such as videos and photos support the project and show how it feels to be a victim of hate speech. For example, the video series "Face the Truth", in which refugees are interviewed, shows how they react to hate speech and what everyone can do to stop online hate.
For the Facebook competition, the team provided measurable evidence of the hits, links and comments of their actions in a weekly report. The campaign included a guerrilla campaign, flyers, posters, a cooperation with a refugee organisation and social media measures to make the target group of 18- to 30-year-olds aware of the issue, encourage them to report hate speech and help them become active themselves. In the end, the student team prevailed against more than 80 international universities, presented their concept to Facebook in Washington D.C. and thus won first prize.
Don't Be Silent (Website) | Don't Be Silent (Facebook) | Don't Be Silent (Instagram)
M.A. Strategic Design and M.A. Marketingkommunikation students
