The event will take place in Barcelona, hosted by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), during the Second International Conference on Media and Information Literacy and Global Understanding (MILID & Global Understanding). This global forum will serve as a key platform for developing strategies to counter disinformation and hate speech in today’s digital society, while fostering cooperation and shared understanding across cultures.

The conference is organized by the Arab Academy and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) – through the MIL Institute  and Gabinete de Comunicación y Educación– within the framework of the UNESCO MILID International Cooperation Program. It also receives institutional support from INCIBE (Spain’s National Cybersecurity Institute) and the collaboration of the UNESCO MILID Network and UNESCO MIL Alliance.

The upcoming conference builds on the success of its first edition, held in Cairo in 2024 under the auspices of the Arab League and UNESCO. That inaugural gathering established a strong consensus on the crucial role of Media and Information Literacy (MIL) and intercultural dialogue in fostering global peace.

One year later, amid escalating global tensions and growing polarization, the Barcelona conference seeks to move from discussion to concrete action. Its central goal is to develop a Common Action Plan that will serve as a reference framework for advancing media education, international cooperation, and ethical digital governance.

Key Objectives

The conference will focus on two major challenges:

Strengthening Global Cooperation by creating an international platform that connects MIL organizations and networks.
Establishing a Common Action Plan to provide a structured roadmap for promoting critical thinking and intercultural dialogue in the digital era.

Core Initiatives within the Common Action Plan

• Developing a Global MILID Research Agenda to inform education policies and strategies.
• Formulating an Ethical and Civic Commitment to responsible engagement with digital media and artificial intelligence.
• Introducing New Methodologies for Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue through digital platforms to foster mutual understanding worldwide.

Conference Structure and Methodology

The program combines plenary sessions and interactive workshops designed to analyze the evolving media landscape and produce actionable solutions.

• Plenary sessions will address the impact of emerging media ecosystems on global discourse.
• Workshops will focus on shaping the Common Action Plan, organized around three main themes:
  MILID & Intercultural Dialogue
  MILID in Research, Education, and Action
  MILID, Digital Rights, Cybersecurity, and Artificial Intelligence

A Milestone for Global Digital Citizenship

Through collaborative engagement and strategic dialogue, the Second MILID & Global Understanding Conference aspires to become a milestone event in the worldwide effort to combat disinformation and hate speech—while advancing an informed, critical, and responsible digital citizenship for the 21st century.

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On this basis, in addition to the main objective, the project pursues the following specific objectives: 

1) to identify scientific literature on the proliferation and effects of disinformation, as well as on ways to counteract it; 

2) to learn about actions, methodological approaches and policies on disinformation in member countries and identify good practices currently being implemented in Europe; 

3) to produce a literature review report on the current gaps in the literature on disinformation in Europe; 

4) to identify the current state of the art on disinformation in Europe and identify good practices in the field of disinformation; 

5) to monitor, exploit and communicate the results and outputs of the project to the scientific community, policy makers, stakeholders and end-users in order to maximise the impact of the project.

The project, which is led by the Gabinete de Comunicación y Educación of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has the participation of the University of Vienna (Austria), the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and the Nova University of Lisbon (Portugal).

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IVERES ‘Identification, Verification and Response. The democratic state facing the challenge of disinterested disinformation’ seeks to develop an information verification system in Spanish that includes, on the one hand, a user interface that naturally collects questions from people who want to verify content and returns a reasoned report that allows them to make decisions. In its experimental development phases, the verification system developed will be available for use by RTVE journalists and is expected to be made available in the future to other professionals from authorised public and private institutions. The duration of the project is 36 months.

The project has the collaboration of other universities such as the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the Universidad de Granada and the Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña.

The research is led by the RTVE-UAB Chair, directed by Santiago Tejedor, director of the Gabinete de Comunicación y Educación, and Pedro Vila Fumas, director of Technology, Innovation and Systems at RTVE.

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CrAL will target young people aged 14-19 to reinterpret and lead the production of audiovisual content. Secondary school teachers and trainers working in non-formal settings will be taught how to educate their students in reading, writing and creative audiovisual production to improve their media literacy and critical thinking skills. Parents and community members will also be involved in the project as active protagonists, in order to maximise the impact of CrAL at local, national and European level.

At UAB, the research is led by Santiago Tejedor, director of the Gabinete de Comunicación y Educación. This creative audiovisual laboratory is based on the methodology of creative audiovisual reading and writing, which has already been tested in secondary schools in Italy by the Central Institute of Sound and Audiovisual Assets (ICBSA) of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

The project will benefit from this experience, adapt it and extend it to four other countries: Spain, Greece, Croatia and Lithuania. 

CrAL is a project funded by Erasmus+ EACEA/34/2019: Social inclusion and common values. It will last for three years and, in addition to the UAB, it has the participation of ALL DIGITAL, (Belgium), EGInA (Italy), Istituto Centrale per I Beni Sonori e Audiovisivi (Italy), Hellenic Open University (Greece), Centre of Technical Culture Rijeka (Croatia) and Association Langas į ateitį (Lithuania).

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The conference focused on exploring and discussing initiatives and projects that can contribute to making Media and Information Literacy (MIL) a tool for promoting global understanding and peace. It highlighted the need for media and journalism to dissolve prejudices and stereotypes that foster hatred and confrontation, and to advance mutual understanding between different countries and social groups by combating misinformation and hate speech. Special emphasis was also placed on the need to foster inter-religious dialogue as a necessary condition for global understanding.

The main outcome of the conference was the adoption of a declaration for global understanding that summarises the points that will be disseminated internationally during the summer months of this year and a concrete action programme that will be shaped throughout 2024.

The declaration is available on the official website of the International Media & Information Literacy Institute in English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

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Capturing new audiences, offering creative content based on user intervention or convergence with other media and exploring new formats are some of the possibilities facing ‘TV’. This is a possible horizon, in a context in which young people are migrating to the Internet to consume news, but also in which the audiovisual is configured as one of the star languages of the panorama.

OI2, the Observatory for News Innovation in the Digital Society aims to:

• give visibility to the latest trends in the field of news and television
• show how these initiatives are developed in a sustainable way, with business models in line with today’s economy.

Case studies, trend reports, meetings and interviews with experts as well as the presentation of good practices are some of the activities that will be developed within the framework of this research platform, promoted by Radio Televisión Española (RTVE) and carried out by two higher education institutions: the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Universidad CEU San Pablo.

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It is a project that was created with the intention of establishing close ties of cooperation between Spanish university students and students, institutions and the media of the countries to which they travel. In this sense, the participants will be able to get to know other socio-cultural realities, witness the functioning of the media of the country visited, participate in the development of cooperation projects, exchange opinions and concerns, etc.

This is an annual initiative that travels each summer to one or more countries, studying the particularities of the cultural and media scene in each of them.

The project aims to establish a new concept of ‘travel’ which, without eliminating the typical aspects of tourist itineraries (leisure, entertainment, rest, etc.), gives special importance to commitment, understanding and analysis of the country visited.

Throughout the trip, participants will follow an academic programme (prepared in advance with the advice of teachers, journalists and media professionals from the country of destination) that will allow them to get the most out of their trip. The planned activities include: talks and colloquiums on aspects related to current affairs in the country visited, interviews with media professionals, preparation of reports or other types of journalistic products, etc.

The expedition members carry out their work divided into Press (Chronicles and Reports), Television, Radio and Photography work teams (see the ‘Galleries’ section to access different photographic collections of the initiatives promoted).

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Reporter@s de la Ciencia aims to educate, raise knowledge and awareness of science among secondary school students. To do so, it uses pedagogical strategies adapted to the profile of this audience (12 to 16 years old) and to their media usage habits, especially digital platforms such as social networks.

Specifically, the project configures and presents students with a gamified experience based on a series of challenges inspired by the universal history of science from a gender perspective. The young people will have to learn and apply the scientific method, adopting the position of a reporter who investigates, documents, contrasts and elaborates information. This participation can take place independently or in a virtual tournament together with other schools in Spain.

The project is committed to the gender perspective in its different actions. In addition, the initiative stands out for its environmental commitment and uses current global challenges, various international anniversaries and celebrations in the field of science, as well as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a cross-cutting thread.

Santiago Tejedor, director of the Gabinete de Comunicación y Educación, is the leader of this initiative. The FECYT supports and finances this proposal as part of the actions for the promotion of scientific, technological and innovation culture 2020, undertaken by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain.

Likewise, Reporter@s de la ciencia has the collaboration of Radio Televisión Española (RTVE), in terms of audiovisual content and dissemination. It also has the support of the Master’s in Environmental Communication and the Master’s in Communication and Education, both from the UAB.

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The research aims to develop, test and validate a technological platform capable of adapting to educational uses and effectively distributing content among the different actors in the system. It will also seek to enhance personalisation and cooperation in production by the user community.

Info/Edu emphasises innovation in secondary schools, and will focus on the use of current audiovisual news content produced by television stations.

More than 300 videos of high thematic and visual quality, free access and easy navigation is the formula that characterises the Info/Edu platform. The portal offers students a current and plural learning experience, allowing them to explore the best content from the most experienced television channels in Ibero-America, such as Corporación de Radio y Televisión Española (RTVE.es) and the Asociación de Televisiones Educativas y Culturales Iberoamericanas (ATEI).

Each student can find on the platform the content that best suits their educational level (primary, secondary, high school and university), their age (children, teenagers, adults), and the subject they are studying (Natural and Social Sciences, History of Art and Spanish Language and Literature). In addition, you can filter the contents depending on the subject (from Big Data, DNA, ecology, surrealist art, Charles Darwin, Coronavirus, etc) and the purpose of the content (for a project, class or for study). 

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During the conference, held in Cairo between 22 and 24 April 2024, a Declaration (in English) shared by all participants on the meaning, role and importance of Media and Information Literacy (MILID) in today’s world was drawn up.

To read the Declaration in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, click the desired language or download the PDFs at the page’s bottom.

ENGLISH

Empowering Youth through Media and Information Literacy

Information providers, encompassing both traditional and new media, wield significant influence over the cultural identity landscape of any society. While the continuous flow of information, media, and technologies presents opportunities for youth education and sustainable development, it also poses genuine risks, particularly for the more vulnerable younger generation. Through the global pandemic that occurred four years ago brought attention to the dangers of an “infodemic,” the current reality is marked by widespread conflicts in different regions, amplifying the challenges associated with disinformation, hate speech, and harmful content online. Despite concerned efforts by major organizations to combat these issues, empowering youth and arming them with critical media and information literacy remains paramount. Globally addressing this need, though, Media and Information Literacy (MIL) becomes crucial, serving as a tool to safeguard children from the potential effects of excessive media use. MIL not only encourages active engagement with information and media but also cultivates critical thinking skills, digital literacy, and life skills, enabling youth to become informed and responsible global citizens.

Media and Information Literacy as a Safeguard for Youth

When discussing issues regarding democracy and development, we often forget that a media literate citizenry is a precondition. An important prerequisite for the empowerment of citizens is a concerted effort to improve media and information literacy – skills that help to strengthen the critical abilities and communication skills which enable individuals to use the media and communication both as tools and as a way of articulating processes of development and social change, enabling people to influence their own lives by making them more in control of their media use. Media and information literacy is needed for all citizens, but is of decisive importance to the younger generation – in their role as citizens and their expression and personal fulfilment. A fundamental element of the efforts to realize a media and information literate society is media education.

Media Literacy as a Prerequisite for Empowered Citizenship

Media and information literacy has become a global trend and tool for upgrading educational systems in different countries. It has become an important tool to encourage creativity and feelings of loyalty, belonging and citizenship. It has become an important mechanism for the democratic participation of citizens in general and youth in particular. It is a way to bring our young people and children from their bubbles in the virtual world to the real world. Furthermore, media and information literacy help empower young people to be active users of the media and not merely passive receivers. In brief, it helps to create an active audience, which we may call “prosumers”, i.e., producers and consumers of media content simultaneously. Media and information literate citizens can also discern “fake news” and “hate speech”, which have become very common, especially on the new media platforms. Such abilities pave the road to better global understanding and result in having more “global citizens” who realize that they share more in common and interact with people from other races, religions and cultures.

Global Impact of Media and Information Literacy

It is recommended that developments in the educational system take into consideration the integration of MIL into the formal school system. It is another tool to reinvigorate the students’ feeling of belonging to their country, their environment and culture.

Students’ acquisition of MIL competencies facilitates intercultural dialogue and the development of mutual understanding through passing on tradition and cultures in new ways and through more tolerance of the other, fostering intercultural and inter-religious dialogue. Nations never develop without critical and creative minds and qualified teachers who can contribute to building and guiding students’ cognitive abilities by teaching them MIL competencies and skills.

Integrating Media Literacy into Formal Education

MIL has been integrated into educational systems in several countries. In Canada, for instance, there is a formal curriculum for all 6 to 18-year-old students. In Finland, there is a cross-cutting curriculum in many subjects. In the USA and Britain, it is integrated as an activity for students, and the same applies to countries like India, the Philippines and some Asian countries. MIL has demonstrated success as a global tool for upgrading educational systems and empowering students. We live in a world full of violence, complications and challenges, and unfortunately, the media are full of fake news, hate speech and harmful content. The only way to tackle these problems is to have a better understanding of the other, countering the negative stereotypes we have about one another. No doubt that media and information literacy can play an important role in this respect.

Here you can read the Declaration in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

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