On February 11, 2022, NGO Mladiinfo Montenegro organized a workshop on fake news at the Mtel Digital Factory. The workshop was led by participants of the SLAM project who participated in the training in Italy, as well as the youth exchange and seminar in Sarajevo.
This workshop was part of the Erasmus + project “SLAM – Structured Learning For Awareness in Media”. One of the main goals of this project is raising awareness and critical thinking among young people when it comes to the role of mass media in creating a more inclusive society towards migrants and refugees. At the beginning, the participants got acquainted with NGO Mladiinfo Montenegro, its history, tasks, projects and activities on social networks through which the general public has the opportunity to get acquainted with its work.
In the second part, the experience from SLAM training in Italy was shared, where NGO Mladiinfo Montenegro participated with representatives of organizations from BiH, Serbia, Albania, Turkey and Italy, who were active throughout the project. This section included an explanation of many workshops through which the participants had the opportunity to learn something new about the role of mass media and the need for a critical approach to the media when it comes to their full functioning, with special emphasis on creating an image of migrants.
The third part included the experience from the youth exchange in Sarajevo where the participants, both through the activities that were present at the training in Italy and those that were more innovative, had the opportunity to learn how the media create different stereotypes about migrants and refugees, as well as the ways in which each of us can deconstruct the media message with a series of questions that analyze the media message and let us know what is behind the scenes.
The fourth part gave us the experience from the seminar in Sarajevo, which gave participants the opportunity to see all the ways migrants and refugees are represented in the media of countries that were part of the project, which allowed participants to see the same problem from different points of view. All of them came to a single conclusion, and that is that migrants and refugees are insufficiently accepted in whatever country they come from. What was also the conclusion of all participants was that these were great opportunities to share different experiences, make new friendships and forever re-examine themselves and their views.
Finally, a special part was the presentation of the “Guide to Victory over Fake News 2021” where participants had the opportunity to learn about how to use the media, ways to deconstruct fake news and the state of fake news in countries that are part of the project.