The campaign to promote accurate and pluralistic knowledge
about the phenomenon in Italy
The results have been presented in a webinar on October 29
Disinformation is a global problem. According to the World Economic Forum’s annual “Global Risks 2024” report, the spread of fake news, enhanced by artificial intelligence tools, could be the most serious global threat in the coming years.
As for Italy, according to the third Ital Communications-Censis Report Misinformation and Fake News in Italy: The 2023 Information System Put to the Test by Artificial Intelligence, 76.5 percent of citizens believe that fake news is increasingly sophisticated and difficult to discover, 20.2 percent believe they lack the skills to recognize it and 61.1 percent believe they only partially have these skills. 29.7% deny existence of fake news.
Disinformation about migration exploits citizens’ fears to polarize public opinion, build discontent and determine governments’ political agendas by acting on people’s insecurities.
According to Eurobarometer findings, in 2024 in Italy, 12 percent of the population indicates immigration as one of the country’s two main problems, while for 8 percent it is one of the two biggest problems to be addressed on a personal level.
These are the considerations and the data from which the project AWAKE: an awareness campaign to counteract disinformation on migration in Italy was born. Funded by ECAS – European Citizen Action Service and implemented by the Foundation ISMU ETS, the project involved students, journalists, stakeholders and civil society organizations.
The results of the campaign have been presented during the webinar AWAKE – The Power of Words Beyond Stereotypes on Migration, on October 29, 2024 with the participation of: Cecilia Lindenberg, project manager for Foundation ISMU ETS; Sara Lemlem, video-maker; and Sumaya Abdel Qader, sociologist and writer, both co-creators together with ISMU Foundation of the online and social media awareness campaign; and featuring the testimony of Germelyn Rose Ignacio, representative of the Filipino community. Avvenire journalist Diego Motta will coordinate.
Project AWAKE
The aim of the project AWAKE is to counteract disinformation and promote accurate and pluralistic knowledge about migration in Italy by providing students from schools of journalism, professional journalists, communication experts from civil society organizations and citizens with adequate tools to understand the complexity of a phenomenon that is too often the subject of fake news and instrumentalization.
The project kicked off on June 20 with the workshop Narrating migration. Between political agenda and the role of the media, which involved journalists and civil society representatives encouraging reflection on the current narrative of migration and the role of the media. From what emerges from the 11th Report of Carta di Roma, from 2013 to 2023 the prevailing media narrative of the migration phenomenon in Italy has been that of permanent emergency, with the presence of alarming words such as “clandestine” in reference to the migrant person, a legally nonexistent as well as denigrating term that appeared in the headlines 1,714 times, 68 times in the first 10 months of 2023.
The communication campaign
The project Awake continued with a social campaign created with the active participation of Sara Lemlem, video maker and founder of the online publishing project Dotz.media, and sociologist and writer, Sumaya Abdel Qader. In four short videos published in October on the Instagram page of ISMU Foundation and on their social pages, the two content creators stimulated reflection on the issues most susceptible to disinformation.
Sumaya Abdel Qader focused on the issues of Italian citizenship for second generations and the urgency of breaking down stereotypes about the figure of the Muslim woman, bringing out, through her own personal testimony, how important the media’s choice of the right words is and the power they have in describing reality and affecting it. Sara Lemlem drew attention to stereotypes regarding communities of foreign origin, focusing on the process of invisibilization suffered by the Filipino community, often traced by the media and in the collective imagination to domestic work alone. She also did so through the testimony of artist Kath Magpantay, a graduate student in architecture at the Milan Polytechnic and a member of KUBO collective, who through her works explores the many facets of Filipino female identity, and Elienor Llanes, a young mother and entrepreneur who runs three businesses and serves as a liaison between first and second generations of Filipinos (the videos on social media about the project AWAKE).
Sumaya Abdel Qader is a researcher, sociologist and writer. Born in Perugia to Jordanian-Palestinian parents, she has been working on women’s rights, promotion of active participation of children of immigrants and interfaith dialogue for more than 20 years. She was among the creators of the first project in Italy created to support and help Muslim women who are victims of violence in their families and/or discriminated against in society. In 2016, she was the first Muslim woman elected to the City Council in Milan.
Sara Lemlem is a videomaker of Ethiopian and Eritrean descent, born and raised in Milan, Italy. Over the years she has collaborated with various newspapers, media companies and news agencies such as Associated Press, Vogue Italia, Rivista Africa, VD. News, NuoveRadici.world e La Via Libera. She founded @dotz.media, a pubblishing project created to amplify voices from marginalized groups.
