RADAR aimed at raising citizens’ awareness on disinformation and providing an accessible public platform for debate on the issue. Our project focused on harnessing citizens’ thoughts on disinformation (bottom-up), providing expert insights into protection against disinformation (top-down) and fomenting interaction and consultation between both (throughput). It had a special focus on youth to contribute to the empowerment of their voices, their engagement in European civil society and improved education on critical thinking and media literacy. RADAR especially focused on building up citizens’ agency through training and the empowerment of citizens. Topics such as the relation between COVID-19 and disinformation, disinformation by information platforms and other relevant themes, were addressed whenever possible.
The project comprised 12 events: 5 Public Debates and 5 Youth Labs in 5 EU Member States, as well as a Brussels Youth Workshop, and a Brussels Policy Conference in Belgium’s capital. The public debates were open to the general public and focused on raising awareness about disinformation through the contributions of experts and practitioners. The youth labs concentrated on working with smaller groups of young people through a peer-learning prism. ‘Youth Ambassadors’ were selected among the participants in the 5 youth labs to participate in the Brussels Youth Workshop, where they devised practical recommendations for EU action against disinformation in their communities. These recommended actions were presented to relevant EU interlocutors in the final concluding conference in Brussels, where a large debate on disinformation also unfolded.
The project’s lifetime was divided into three phases:
- The Incubation Phase – from October 2022 to March 2023;
- The Interaction Phase – from March 2023 to December 2023;
- The Insight Phase – from December 2023 to March 2024.
TEPSA implemented RADAR as the leader of a consortium containing five other leading research institutes, all of whom are part of the TEPSA network: Österreichische Gesellschaft für Europapolitik (ÖGFE), Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA), Institut für Europäische Politik (IEP), and the Jagiellonian University.
