Fake news, disinformation, conspiracy theories, antisemitism. Today, when reaching a large audience, easier than ever free access to information comes with a price. Political extremities, populists, fanatics, and malicious actors can polarize people to their own gains using the above mentioned methods. We must fight these.
The media has a role in recognizing, filtering, and countering these phenomena. The Hungarian Free Market Foundation, with the support of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, launched a project to help the media and individuals in recognizing, understanding, and countering antisemitism.
The project has three main components, each aimed at explaining the forms of antisemitism and the actions that can be taken against it.
First, a guide has been developed in partnership with CEJI primarily for the media, but written in a way that is useful for anyone. The guide, titled “Antisemitism: A Guide on Recognizing, Understanding, and Countering Antisemitism” explains the far right’s and the far lefts relationship with antisemitism, shows what populist antisemitism is, debunks myths, provides a history of antisemitism, defines terms, and presents how disinformation and conspiracy theories can be connected to antisemitism. At the end of the guide, a section lists the hands on actions one can take to counter antisemitism.
Unfortunately, such a document is not long enough to tackle such a large and complex issue. To make understanding it more engaging, we developed an interactive and visually stimulating online exhibition. This transports visitors to a fictional country, and follows their struggles from the moment they land there.
The story showcases the terrors and of a racist and totalitarian regime. The exhibition is segmented into chapters, each of which has an interconnected storyline with videos to make it more immersive, as well as a section from the guide, where background information is provided. Each chapter has a quiz at the end to gamify active learning.
A pressing question of every project is how to reach people who are not already interested in a given topic. To solve this, Free Market Foundation has started a language course “At Peace with English” for people who want to improve their English. Intermediate-level exercises teach the passive voice, basic tenses, and conditionals, among others. The course uses videos to explain the grammar and to show how it is used in practice.
The way it ties into the topic of antisemitism is that the videos present stories of people helping Jews during WWII, explain disinformation or ways to counter antisemitism.
Free Market Foundation is committed to countering antisemitism. Check out the links above to learn more on how you can take action to do the same!
