Council of Europe, Strasbourg, France 17-19 JUNE 2026
A democracy Hackathon at the Palais de l’Europe in Strasbourg under the New Democratic Pact for Europe,and under the auspices of the Monaco Presidency of the Committee of Ministers, bringing together innovators, activists, and policy-makers to co-design tools that fight hate speech. Organised jointly with the No Hate Speech Week of the Council of Europe.
Four challenges and four mentors accompanying challengers during
the Hackathon and winners in their next steps toward implementation. Results that contribute to the New Democratic Pact, in addition to 230 contributions already received. Interaction with more than 200 attendants of the No Hate Speech Week.
The Council of Europe has initiated a political and strategic consultation for a New Democratic Pact for Europe aiming at addressing the current democratic backsliding. The 17-19 June 2026 Democracy Hackathon dedicated to combating hate speech will feed directly into this consultation process to strengthen the foundations of democracy, amplify its benefits, restore trust, and innovate its forms to make it tangible and meaningful for all.
Hate speech is silencing voices and eroding the shared digital spaces on which democracy depends. Deepfakes, algorithmic amplification, and co-ordinated harassment campaigns have made the problem faster, harder to trace, and harder to counter.
The New Democratic Pact for Europe consultations so far highlight the importance of democratic security, safeguarding the values that form the foundation of democratic societies. Safe democratic participation for all, including women and under-represented groups is at the core of democratic security and hate speech puts these values at risk. The Hackathon and the No Hate Speech Week aim to address that.
What is happening during Hackathon?
The Democracy Hackathon is a high-intensity collaborative event at the Palais de l'Europe. Teams of 3–4 people, each mixing at least one person with a technology background (coding/data science), one democracy /policy or expert, and one specializing in design/front-end development - spend three days developing practical, rights-based solutions to a shared challenge.
The Hackathon, organised under the New Democratic Pact for Europe runs alongside the No Hate Speech Week, giving teams direct access to European human rights practitioners, regulators, civil society leaders, and policymakers as mentors and audience throughout the event.
The Hackaton is organised under the auspices of the Monaco Presidency of the Committee of Ministers.
From fighting disinformation to combating hate speech
This is the second Democracy Hackathon under the Council of Europe's New Democratic Pact for Europe. In 2025, teams delivered solutions to the challenge of disinformation: an echo-chamber breaker, a gamified fact-checking platform for teenagers, and an open data visualiser for citizens. In 2026, the issue is to address hate speech with a choice of four different challenges.
The winning teams' solutions may feed directly into Council of Europe policy workstreams. This is not symbolic. Participants are building tools that could shape how Europe responds.
What is Youth Contest?
The Youth Contest is an international challenge designed for university and master's students from across Europe. It takes place during the Hack the Hate, renew Democracy event on 17-19 June 2026, which combines a Democracy Hackathon and the No Hate Speech Week at the headquarters of the Council of Europe. This contest offers participants the opportunity to explore key democratic challenges, engage with experts and peers from different countries, and transform key learnings into creative and impactful solutions. About 20 students from different European countries will participate in the contest in teams of five.
Team composition: 1 technologist, 1 democracy expert, 1 designer or front-end developer
Costs: Free event, travel and accommodation covered for all selected teams
Eligibility: Open to residents of any of the 46 Council of Europe member state
Language: English
Prize: €15,000 Council of Europe development grant and $50,000 in “Azure” grant from Microsoft in development support to participating teams across four competition tracks, backed jointly by Microsoft and the Council of Europe.
Winner and finalists
The winner: Quorum — United Kingdom
When a co-ordinated hate campaign targets a candidate, the evidence lands in five different inboxes and no single institution ever sees the full picture — MOSAIC is built to fix that.
When online abuse targets a political candidate, the reports scatter across platforms, NGOs, police, electoral commissions and prosecutors - each seeing only a fragment, none able to act on the whole. The Quorum team from the United Kingdom has mapped this fragmentation precisely: one coordinated misogynistic campaign can generate a 4,600% surge in hostile content within 24 hours, yet 63% of reports never reach any institution at all. The problem is not a lack of evidence — it is that the evidence is invisible until someone aggregates it, and no tool currently does that.
Their solution, MOSAIC, inverts the logic entirely. Survivors report once — anonymously, in two minutes, on any phone — and the system does the rest. Raw text never leaves the device; on-device embedding converts each report into an anonymous vector, and the system only surfaces a cluster when at least five independent reports converge around the same incident. A human analyst then reviews cluster summaries and must approve every evidence package before it reaches electoral commissions, NGOs or prosecutors. The output is a pre-formatted, legally structured file ready for action - without any platform co-operation required.
Finalist: LUMEN — Romania
A handful of co-ordinated accounts can make manufactured outrage look like a mass movement - LUMEN makes that trick visible, publicly, without removing a single word.
Online hate is increasingly not spontaneous public anger but manufactured consensus - small networks of accounts pushing a single message hard and fast until it looks like a real movement. The LUMEN team from Romania points to the core analytical problem: the words used by a coordinated campaign and a genuine wave of public sentiment can be identical, making keyword-based detection useless. Meanwhile, the two conventional responses - surveillance and censorship - both violate fundamental rights. What is missing is a tool that describes coordination without policing speech or tracking people.
LUMEN's answer is to describe rather than remove: an open, auditable public tool that scores coordination from five behavioural signals - repeated messaging, unusual speed, synchronised timing, unexplained volume spikes and deviation from normal posting patterns - and publishes its findings openly, like an official statistics report. Identities are one-way hashed per time window and then discarded; no identity is ever stored. A human reviewer must approve every finding before publication; uncertain cases are marked insufficient evidence, never an accusation. The tool is open-source, so anyone can re-run the model and challenge a result - and it is designed to scale across all 46 Council of Europe member states.
Finalist: Bulle — France
Social media feeds are designed to reward outrage and sort us into camps - Bulle is a depolarisation algorithm that breaks the bubble from the inside, using our own side's disagreements.
Online toxicity rose 30% in just nine months of 2023, and nearly half of young Europeans encountered hostile or degrading messages that year. The Bulle team from France traces the root cause not to individual bad actors but to the architecture of social feeds: algorithms that reward the content that provokes the strongest reaction push outrage to the top, and those attacked most - women, minorities, young people - go quiet or leave. The result is a self-reinforcing loop of echo chambers where each side grows certain that everyone agrees with them, and the other side slowly stops looking human.
Bulle's answer is counterintuitive: showing people the other camp's views just makes them dig in. What actually opens minds is discovering that people on your own side disagree. Their solution is a depolarisation algorithm called Step Out of Your Bubble, designed to plug into any social network. It groups users by what they react to, surfaces topics their own group is genuinely split on, and surfaces these as gentle contradictions - 51% of people who share your opinions liked this. Your side is split. Discover why. No content is removed, no algorithm is forced on anyone, and a plain non-personalised feed is always one tap away. The goal is to remind people there is someone real on the other side of the screen.
Finalist: ALL FOR ONE — Moldova
Every hate speech detector today reads the whole post — including everything that identifies who wrote it — AgnoSpeech proves the harm can be detected without seeing the human at all.
Current hate speech detection systems operate on raw user text, meaning there is no privacy layer between the author and the model, the logs or the moderation queue. The ALL FOR ONE team from Moldova identifies two compounding failures: detectors trained on raw text learn to use identity as a shortcut for hate speech - dialect, hidden cues, and writing style - while also enabling re-identification and doxing through stylometric fingerprinting. The communities most exposed to online harm are silenced by the tools meant to defend them. The goal of this project: let people study harm and build better protection from real data, without re-exposing the victims, bystanders, or authors inside it.
AgnoSpeech is a local, CPU-only tool that turns sensitive text, like a helpline's record of abusive messages, into something an organization can safely share, without the raw data ever leaving the device. Most tools stop at deleting names, but writing style alone can still re-identify an author. AgnoSpeech goes further: it redacts identifiers, reduces each message to the content that matters. It then checks that the meaning was preserved (no accidental distortion) and runs an attacker against its own output to measure how much identity signal remains, so instead of promising the data is safe, it shows you a number and proof the original never left your computer.
Winners of 2025
2025 First prize: The Fact-Checking Foxes (Italy) took top prize for a fun, classroom tool that helps teens outsmart fake news - no AI, just sharp thinking.
EchoBreaker (Georgia) earned a special mention for bursting filter bubbles.
Sunflower (Italy) got a special mention for making open data easy to access and understand.
First prize: ‘The Fact-Checking Foxes’ (Italy)
The 2025 top prize was awarded to The Fact-Checking Foxes for their innovative classroom solution that proposed to use game-based pre-bunking to help adolescents develop critical thinking skills by analyzing real-world false claims.
What made the project stand out?
Fully integrated into the classroom
Engaging, game-based learning
No reliance on AI-generated content
Special mention: ‘Echobreaker’ (Georgia)
Special mention was awarded to ‘Echobreaker’ for their tool designed to break echo chambers by highlighting ideological bias and offering alternative perspectives. Key feature: a personal dashboard that displayed ideological diversity scores and suggested content from a range of media viewpoints.
Special mention: Sunflower (Italy)
Special mention was awarded to ‘Sunflower’ for their mobile app translating open data into accessible visual insights with context and social features. Key feature: a three-click usability design that simplified access to open data for all users.
Challenges
The Privacy-preserving Hate Speech Detection Challenge – mentored by a researcher from the Technical University of Munich
The Problem: The challenge operates at the intersection of Hate Speech Detection (HSD) and privacy protection, particularly with the ultimate goal of maximizing the “privacy-HSD” trade-off, where the optimal scenario maximizes HSD performance while minimizing loss to personal privacy protections. Using state-of-the-art techniques and metrics from both research fields, we challenge participants to innovate ways in which HSD can continue to function as urgently needed, but not at the cost of creating harmful re-identification tools. The team that can achieve the best trade-off wins!
The Objective: Innovate a new HSD method that operates agnostically to the author’s identity. The goal is to maximise the "Privacy-HSD trade-off"— achieving high detection performance while minimising the loss of personal privacy protections.
Potential Output: A Demonstrable Concept or working prototype accompanied by a research note articulating its rights-based architecture and privacy-preserving features. The winning team should expect to share their full results and take part in publishing their results in a scientific publication.
Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour (CIB) Identification - mentored by a senior fellow from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue
The Problem: Hate-based narratives are increasingly driven by "smarter" coordinated networks rather than organic user behaviour.
The Objective: Build a tool that detects when hate-based narratives emerge across platforms and accounts in a short window of time. LLM enabled semantic clustering can be used instead of being limited to keyword-based queries to group mentions by intention and meaning rather than simply by identical language. Participants should include at least one gendered campaign (e.g. coordinated harassment of women politicians or activists) among their test cases, as these are among the most documented forms of CIB and provide a concrete benchmark for the tool's real-world relevance. An important threshold is determining line between coordination and organic behaviour from many authentic users.
Potential Output: Visualized summary of narrative clusters in a dashboard designed for use by analysts or journalists. The dashboard should allow filtering by targeted identity group, including gender.
From reporting to response: Addressing online hate and gender-based violence – mentored by a researcher of Democracy Reporting International
The Problem: The challenge responds to a practical implementation gap during electoral periods, when harmful content is often encountered online but remains difficult for institutional actors to document, assess, and escalate. While legal frameworks and multi-stakeholder mechanisms already exist, reporting pathways are often fragmented, unevenly accessible, or not designed around gender-sensitive and electoral-risk criteria. The goal is to support timely, proportionate, and rights-respecting responses without undermining legitimate political debate or freedom of expression.
The Objective: DRI invites teams to design a tech-enabled reporting and referral solution aimed primarily at institutional actors, including but not limited to electoral commissions, trusted flaggers, and platform integrity teams. Rather than focusing only on the reporting interface, the solution should help turn user-submitted reports of suspected online hate speech and gender-based violence (OGBV) against women, as well as trans and non-binary candidates into structured evidence that can support classification, assessment, prioritisation, and clear escalation or referral logic.
Potential Output: Teams are expected to present a prototype/MVP, wireframe, or proof of concept that shows how reports of suspected online hate speech and OGBV would be collected, structured, classified, prioritised, and referred to relevant institutional actors. The output should include a proposed user flow, key data fields, classification criteria, and referral/escalation logic.
Think out of the box - mentored by an academic researcher and lecturer from the University of Strasbourg
The Problem: What if tackling hate speech was not only about removing harmful content—but about transforming the social dynamics that produce it? Hate speech online is a growing and complex societal issue, affecting social cohesion, mental health, and democratic discourse. While current solutions focus largely on detection and content removal, they often fail to capture context, address bias, or empower users. This challenge invites participants to think out of the box and go beyond traditional moderation approaches. Rather than focusing solely on detection, teams are encouraged to explore new ways to prevent, contextualize, counter, and transform hate speech in digital environments.
The Objective: Design a solution that prevents, contextualises, counters, or transforms hate speech rather than simply moderating it. Teams are encouraged to combine technology, design, policy, and creative approaches, targeting any relevant group from social media users and platform moderators to educators, NGOs, or policymakers. An intersectional approach to the work, including gender, age, origin and/or other grounds of discrimination is encouraged.
Potential Output: A functional prototype or MVP in any form (web or mobile application, moderation support interface, educational experience, policy framework, or creative concept with social impact), accompanied by a 5-minute pitch and a short concept paper outlining design choices, methodology, and ethical considerations.
Mentors and Jury
Mentors
What’s a Mentor at a Hackathon?
A mentor is a resource person available throughout the event to guide teams on strategy, ethics, and technical aspects. They will help refine ideas, give feedback, and ensure your project aligns with the challenge goals.
Mentors come from various fields, and their goal is to help you learn, stay motivated, and if you are among winning team(s) – develop your solutions!
Camila works as a Digital Democracy Research Officer at Democracy Reporting International, where she focuses on online political discourse, disinformation, hate speech, online gender-based violence, and platform accountability. She has experience designing social media monitoring methodologies, analysing digital threats during elections, and translating research findings into actionable recommendations for civil society, regulators, and platforms.
Sabine Cullmann is a sociologist and professor in management at the Faculty of Economics and Management at the University of Strasbourg. She holds a doctorate on project management. Sabine is, among many other things, responsible for several Master's programs in innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Her current research topics concern especially Hackathons. She also has almost twenty years of professional experience in industry and managed a biz unit with a turnover of 40 M€.
Stephen is a researcher currently finishing his doctorate in Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich. Stephen is passionate about all things research, but particularly at the intersection of data privacy and Natural Language Processing.
Zahed Amanullah is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, where he leads efforts to counter targeted hate and extremism worldwide for vulnerable communities. He serves on the Strategic Advisory Council for the United Religions Initiative and is a former Director of the Concordia Forum (2011-2022), a global Muslim leadership network.
Elena Yurkina is Head of Unit at the Council of Europe, where she leads initiatives focused on digital transformation, innovation, and human rights–based reforms in the justice sector. She brings extensive experience in international co-operation projects and legal tech innovation, having organised multiple initiatives on the digitalisation of justice, including the Digital Future of Justice Hackathon hackathons.
Laetitia Dimanche is a legal officer within the Secretariat of the Steering Committee on New and Emerging Digital Technologies (CDNET). She has previously served in the Secretariat of the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ), the Committee of Experts on Combating Hate Speech (ADI/MSI-DIS). Laetitia has substantial experience in international cooperation projects focused on digitalisation of justice and has actively contributed to the organisation of several hackathons exploring the Digital Future of Justice.
Thomas Lampert, professor and former Chair of AI and Data Science at the University of Strasbourg, holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of York. His research focuses on both the theoretical foundations of AI and its applications across diverse domains. He serves as ICube's referent to the Council of Europe CDNET committee and, as an AI expert, helped develop a training course on AI for the Council’s Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) programme.
Arturo Ortega is Kreativdistrikt’s Methodology Curator. He specialises in Business and UX design, helping organisations across Europe and the Americas create stronger value propositions and design better products, services, and experiences.
Giorgi Jokhadze is Programme Manager at the Council of Europe's Cybercrime Division in Strasbourg, leading joint EU/Council of Europe projects on cybercrime and electronic evidence in the Eastern Partnership region since 2015. He has previously held management and consulting roles with the Government of Georgia and international organisations such as ICRC, UNODC, and OECD, focusing on criminal justice, cybercrime, and cybersecurity. He holds degrees in International Law from Tbilisi State University and Lund University/Raoul Wallenberg Institute.
Jury
Alain Berset
Alain Berset has served as Secretary General of the Council of Europe since September 2024, having previously served as a minister in the Swiss government, where he headed the Federal Department of Home Affairs and served twice as President of the Swiss Confederation. He played a central role in managing the COVID-19 pandemic and represented Switzerland on the international stage, notably at the UN Security Council and at the Reykjavik Summit. Before entering politics, he taught economics at the University of Neuchâtel.
Maya Lahav
Maya Lahav is a cyber-criminologist at Oxford University, researching how online platforms and AI shape crime and institutional responses to harm. Previously, she worked as Head of Section in the Danish Ministry of Defence’s cyber defence unit and in the tech sector as a team lead in intelligence research focused on online criminal ecosystems and platform safety.
Ayisha Piotti
Ayisha Piotti is a globally recognised independent expert, thought leader and bridge builder in AI policy. Dedicated to ensuring emerging technologies ethically serve society and future generations, her cross-sector career spans over two decades across the United Nations, multinational industry, and public office, as a local parliamentarian. As Managing Partner of the think tank RegHorizon and Founder of the global AI Policy Summit in Zurich for Switzerland, she has established one of Europe’s most influential multi-stakeholder dialogue platforms on AI while regularly advising international governance bodies, industry ethics councils, and elite academic institutions worldwide.
Lisa Yasko
Lisa Yasko is a Member of the Parliament of Ukraine, serving on the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Interparliamentary Cooperation and representing Ukraine in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). A political scientist and Oxford-trained public policy specialist, she focuses on Ukraine’s security, European integration, human rights, international cooperation, and postwar recovery. Yasko is also the founder of Yellow Blue Strategy, an advocate of cultural diplomacy, and a frequent lecturer on foreign affairs, governance, leadership, and soft power at leading universities and international institutions.
Rares Voicu
Rareș has been involved in the field of youth and child participation since the age of 15. Over the past seven years, he has successfully led various youth organisations at the local, national, and international level, tirelessly advocating for the rights of his peers and empowering them to have their voices heard by decision-makers. He has previously served as a Board Member of the European Youth Forum and has worked for UNICEF in the field of child and adolescent engagement, supporting the participation of children in decision-making processes.
Lion’s Den Jury
Stephen Meisenbacher
Researcher, Technical University of Munich
Olivier Tete
Innovation Project Manager, Council of Europe
Kristian Bartholin
Head of Data Protection Unit, Council of Europe
Zahed Amanullah
Senior Fellow, Institute for Strategic Dialogue
Victoria Grech
Founder & CEO, Truzentia
Stephane Casset
Innovation Project Manager, Council of Europe
Albina Ovcearenco
Head of Digital Development Unit, Council of Europe
Flurina Frei
Gender Equality Policy Advisor, Council of Europe
Camila Weinmann
Researcher, Democracy Reporting International
Sabine Cullman
Aacademic Researcher and Lecturer, University of Strasbourg
Cindy Ortega
External expert, Senior Data Engineer and Analytics Specialist
Panos Kakaviatos
Media and Communications Advisor, Council of Europe
Schedule
Wednesday, 17 June 2026
8:15 Registration at the Palais de l’Europe
9:00 Welcome session for No Hate Speech Week and Democracy Hackathon- Hemicycle
Logistics information and technical announcements
9:30 Working/hacking sessions + mentor support (Room 7, 10, 11)
11:00 Break (coffee & tea)
11:30 Working/hacking sessions + mentor support (Room 7, 10, 11)
12:30Reception for Hackathon and No Hate Speech Week with Member States representatives – foyer of the Hemicycle
14:00 Opening of the Hackathon & No Hate Speech Week – Hemicycle
Keynote speech
Alain Berset, Secretary General of the Council of Europe
14:20 Panel Discussion & Q&A - The Ethical dilemma of Tech Innovation
Moderators: Liz Alderman, journalist and former New York Times correspondent and Sally Bailey-Ravet, Council of Europe
Inbal Becker-Reshef Microsoft AI for Good
Maya Lahav, Cyber criminologist at Oxford University
Victoria Grech, Founder & CEO, Truzentia
Pam Dixon, Founder and executive director, World Privacy Forum
15:00 Author Giuliano da Empoli in conversation with Liz Alderman Moderators: Sally Bailey-Ravet, Council of Europe and Hugo Espinosa, Kreativdistrikt
15:30 Presentation of Hackathon challenges and teams
15:45 Break (coffee & tea)
16:15 Working/hacking sessions + mentor support (Room 7, 10, 11)
16:15 – 17:45 Youth Contest (Room 8)
17:45 Working/hacking sessions + mentor support until 19.45 (Room 7, 10, 11)
Thursday, 18 June 2026
8:30 Registration & info desk opens
9:00 Working/hacking sessions + mentor support (Room 7, 10, 11)
10:30 Break (coffee & tea)
11:00 Plenary for the International Day for Countering Hate Speech - Hemicycle
Statement for the International Day for Countering Hate Speech
Alain Berset, Secretary General of the Council of Europe
11:10 Debate: Online hate speech is Europe’s biggest threat to youth’s involvement in democracy House for the motion:
Ana Kuprava, Georgia
Arman Martirosyan, Armenia
Rok Saric, Slovenia
House against the motion:
Serena Gandogonon, France
Vetle Skrede, Norway
Mazin Abdalla, Sudan
Feedback from the audience
12:00 Reflections by:
Alain Berset, Council of Europe’s Secretary General
Gilles Marchand, Director Initiative Media Philanthropy (IMP), University of Geneva
12:30 Award Ceremony: Journalism Excellence Awards “Ethical reporting on Roma and Travellers and combating antigypsyism through the media”
Introduction by:
Alain Berset, Secretary General of the Council of Europe
Frédéric FAUTRIER, Directeur Général du Département de l’Intérieur, Committee of Ministers Presidency of Monaco
Moderators:
Nidhya Paliakara, journalist TV5MONDE
Alex Taylor, European journalist
13:00 Lunch reception (60 minutes) – foyer of the Hemicycle
8:30 Working/hacking sessions + mentor support (Room 7, 10, 11)
9:00 Selection of four finalist teams per challenge
10:30Democracy Hackathon and No Hate Speech Week closing session – Room 1
10:30 Democracy Hackathon Dragon’s Den presentations by four finalists
Moderator: Hugo Espinosa, Kreativdistrikt- hackathon
Hackathon – Grand Finale Dragon’s Den - Presentation four projects
11:30 Break (coffee & tea) while the Judges deliberate
12:00 Awards ceremony
Moderators: Liz Alderman and Sally Bailey-Ravet
12:00 Conclusions from the No Hate Speech Week
Aurora Ailincai, Head of Anti-discrimination and Inclusion Department, Council of Europe
12:15 Remark by Judges
Lisa Yasko, Vice-Chairperson, Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Special Committee on the New Democratic Pact
Rares Voicu, President, European Youth Forum
Maya Lahav, Cyber-criminologist, Oxford University
Ayisha Piotti, Global independent expert in AI policy
12:40 Closing remarks and announcement on the Hackathon winner
Alain Berset, Secretary General of the Council of Europe
13:00 Lunch reception for No Hate Speech Week & Democracy Hackathon participants - canteen of the Palais
Council of Europe, Strasbourg, France 
17-19 JUNE 2026 
Four challenges and four mentors accompanying challengers during
About
Date: 17–19 June 2026 
Location: Palais de l'Europe, Strasbourg 
Team size: 3–4 members (preformed teams required) 
Team composition: 1 technologist, 1 democracy expert, 1 designer or front-end developer
Eligibility: Open to residents of any of the 46 Council of Europe member state 
Language: English 
Prize: €15,000 Council of Europe development grant and $50,000 in “Azure” grant from Microsoft in development support to participating teams across four competition tracks, backed jointly by Microsoft and the Council of Europe.
The winner: Quorum — United Kingdom 
Wednesday, 17 June 2026 