Twitter UK supporting #KlickItOut & the Media Diversity Institute

We recently worked with the the Media Diversity Institute who have developed a simple guide for challenging negative voices and prejudice for civil society organisations and individuals. This guide will be distributed to teachers and schools around Europe.

Available in four languages (English, French, Hungarian, and Greek), the guide was written by Dr Paul Iganski and Dr Abe Sweiry from Lancaster University and from h8hurts, an organisation that is building a resource bank of ideas and suggestions on how to challenge prejudice on and offline.

Giulia Dessi, Project Coordinator at the Media Diversity Institute, commented, “Many people who want to do something to contrast hate speech don’t know where to start. With the Stopping Hate guide, MDI wants to provide some guidance on how to challenge hateful views on Twitter while keeping safe. Working with Twitter has been vital to the success of the guide - from the team’s help with tailoring the guide, to their willingness to ensure its wider distribution.”

The full guide can be found here. 

As well as working with MDI, we also supported the #KlickItOut campaign during Euro 2016, led by Kick It Out (@kickitout). During the tournament we saw more than 109 million Tweets related to #EURO2016 and Kick It Out used the massive interest to educate users about the potential consequences of abusive behavior and to challenge football fans to report abuse when they see it.

Supported with an Ads For Good grant, their campaign video was viewed by more than 315,000 people, with 2.8m people seeing a Kick It Out Tweet over the course of the #KlickItOut campaign.

We know that removing content doesn’t remove the underlying prejudice. But both of these UK campaigns highlight how expert partners can harness the power of Twitter to educate people and challenge behavior, and we’re excited to see the outcomes from their campaigns and look forward to supporting more like them in the future.