Videos against misinformation: Valencian youth fight racist Fake News during DANA

-Nearly 150 students from Valencia learn to identify fake news in the Crítica project and become agents to neutralise hoaxes

-October flood leaves a new wave of disinformation with racist and Islamophobic undertones that threaten intercultural community coexistence

-In Spain, more than half of young people recognise that they do not know how to distinguish between true and false information while using social media

CRÍTICA | Valencian youth combat racist Fake News during DANA through short video campaigns starring and directed by teenagers.

To combat disinformation by neutralising hoaxes and fake news through short video campaigns starring Valencian young people and teenagers that raise awareness and a critical spirit among their peers. This is the main objective of the Crítica project after the flood of 29 October in the province of Valencia, which has awakened a strong wave of disinformation with strong racist and Islamophobic components.

Around 150 secondary school students have learnt this year to verify any suspicious information they receive on their mobile phones or digital platforms and to stop it from going viral if it is untrue, misleading or attacks the dignity of any group or person. In addition to identifying these cases, they have also become active agents in the fight against disinformation through the creation of short video campaigns directed by and for young people where they raise awareness of the importance of reading content critically and impart key tips to ‘avoid being tricked’, as the project’s slogan indicates.

In the first two editions of Crítica, 650 students from eight schools in the Valencia Region have already been trained. This project promoted by Jovesólides aims to promote respect for human rights through the verification of information in order to curb hoaxes and fake news, a plague that has skyrocketed among young people and adolescents with the popularisation of social media.

Migrants, the target of Fake News during DANA

More than half of Spanish adolescents have difficulty identifying when a news story is false, according to a Save the Children report published in September 2024 on misinformation and exposure to hate speech by children and adolescents in the digital environment. The analysis also indicates that 60 per cent use social media as their primary means of accessing information.

Precisely, social platforms are the medium where fake news moves best, going viral up to 10 times faster than real news. In the wave of disinformation that has accompanied the DANA, the migrant population has become the preferred target of hate speech disseminated on social networks, as indicated in a recent report by the Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia (Oberaxe).

This study shows that 30% of hate speech during the month of November was related to the migrant population in the context of the DANA. More than half of these contents criminalised the group, falsely blaming them for the public insecurity generated after the flood, for receiving exclusive public aid and falsely accusing them of not collaborating in the clean-up and recovery work.

Stigmatisation was particularly severe during the first days of the tragedy, targeting especially people from North Africa (61%), Muslim women (27%) and the Roma community (10%).

These hoax campaigns have direct consequences on intercultural coexistence as they generate a climate of strong hostility and hate attacks on citizens of migrant origin.

The last mile of solidarity: How civil society rebuilding Valencia came to your door during the floods to help your community get back on its feet.

Crítica is a project of education for global citizenship funded by the Department of Development Cooperation and Migration of the City Council of Valencia and the Directorate General for Diversity of the Vice-Presidency of Social Services, Equality and Housing of the Generalitat Valenciana. You can follow all the news of the project through the hashtags #Crítica and #QueNoTeLaCuelen on social networks.