The monitoring reports published this week by European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) (Belgium, Germany) underline the need for more research into how we can make human rights narratives that counter hate speech more effective.

This week the consortium of partners for the “WE CAN for human rights speech” project have started testing their research methods into identifying and quantifying the criteria that should be taken into consideration when trying to figure out what types of events/situations tend to generate more hate speech online.

At the same time, we are preparing our research on the effect of timing and formats of human rights narratives to maximise the reach to target audiences. The research results will be collected in reports which will be available in September and will help activists and NGOs be more effective in their counter narrative campaigns.

This project is funded by the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (2014-2020) and the Council of Europe and is co-ordinated by the Council of Europe in consortium with Active Watch (Romania), APICE (Italy), Neue Deutsche Medienmacher (Germany), CEJI (Belgium).

 More information can be found on the project webpage.