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European Café: Young People from Chișinău Have Learned how to Avoid the Risks Coming from the Social Media

31 January 2017
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Young people from Chișinău participated on Friday, 27th of January, in the first event conducted this year within the European Café. The activity was organised by the Independent Journalism Centre in the premises of iHUB Chișinău and it addressed the following issue: “The social media – a double-edged weapon”. The participants in the event learned, in an informal atmosphere, about the opportunities and the risks deriving from the online media from the guests Elena Robu, Victor Spînu, Vlada Ciobanu and Eugenia Maxim.
 
Elena Robu revealed for the youngsters to what extent the fakes are spread by the means of the social media tools in order to influence on the public opinion or to divert attention away from other events of public interest.
 
Vlada Ciobanu described her experience in terms of organising and promoting civic initiatives through the blogs and social media tools. In this context, Vlad presented the ingredients of a successful campaign, recommending certain impactful initiatives, and finally stated that there are no obvious social causes. They need to be promoted, like any other product.
 
How to fight against the trolls? This question was answered by Victor Spânu, one of the authors of “Trolles” application intended to protect us against the invasion of trolls. As this phenomenon is becoming widespread and has an increasing impact on the public, Victor emphasized to what extent it is important for the internauts to realise that it can be countered with the contribution of each of us. The guest pointed out that “Trolles” application, developed for this purpose, has about 900 users, who reported more than 1,900 suspicious profiles and detected 570 fake profiles so far. The young man called the participants to be vigilant in order not to fall into the trap of the trolls.
  
Eugenia Maxim, coordinator of Peer Educators Programme of La Strada International Centre, raised the issue of online safety and the risks to which children and adolescents are exposed. The harmful content, the security of personal information, cyber bullying can seriously affect the children, and the number of those exposed to such phenomena is growing. Eugenia presented a set of tools that can be found on siguronline.md website, for children, youngsters, teachers, parents or anyone who knows a case of online abuse against a child and wants to help him/her.
 
Elena Nofit, PR Manager at the National Centre for Prevention of Child Abuse, shared her impressions about this activity, saying that the event was interesting and very useful, as it provided topical information and details about how to filter the information disseminated through the networks, how to cope with the risks and how to develop and promote a civic initiative, using the social media tools.
 
The youngsters who attended the event asked questions, shared their opinions and interacted with each other. At the end, the most active of them were awarded prizes by the organisers and by the event’s partner, Bestseller Bookstore. Elena Nofit, Vladislav Șaran and Iulia Cobzac were among the most active participants.
 
European Café is an event conducted within the project “Strengthening the independence of the communication media”, implemented by the Independent Journalism Centre and Internews.