Re-ACT

In January 2022, SYNYO successfully completed the Re-ACT project, in which it developed an online prevention hub for educators, civil society organisations and practitioners addressing antisemitism and antigypsyism online. In the project, SYNYO was able to combine its experience in web development and security related research, supported by the Re-ACT consortium, coordinated by the International network against cyber hate. 

Project Re-ACT, which stands for Remember and ACT, has been successfully completed in January 2022, having started in February 2020, after a duration of exactly two years. The project received funding from the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (REC 2014 – 2020). 

In Re-ACT, which has been coordinated by the International network against cyber hate, SYNYO also worked closely with the other project partners, namely the French International League against Racism and antisemitism and the Czech ROMEA; while the European Union of Jewish Students, the European Grassroots Organisations Network and CEJI- a Jewish contribution to an Inclusive Europe also played an important role and shared their knowledge and network with Re-ACT. 

Re-ACT was initiated due to an analysis of hate-data collected by members of the international network against cyber-hate (a group of 29 European human rights CSOs), which highlighted strong links between current online hate-phenomena, with a particular focus on antisemitism and antigypsyism, and practices that have been propagated in the Third Reich. 

To transform these worrisome findings into effective warnings, the project placed a specific focus on researching how “old” concepts of antisemitism and antigypsyism are being re-enacted by concerted hate campaigns and where they originated from. Starting from there, Re-ACT developed, collected and provided educational materials and tools for the prevention of racism, xenophobia, homophobia and other forms of intolerance. 

Project results

Based on these self-generated sets of information plus a curated collection of high-quality educational materials SYNYO developed an online prevention hub. 

To achieve this, SYNYO first carried out an in-depth need analysis to gather the wishes, needs and challenges faced by the potential end-user groups of the hub like educators or members of civil society organisations. The analysis identified a number of existing barriers, like a lack of best practices, for instance on how to counter antisemitism online, preventing practitioners to address hate speech and practices in a more effective manner. 

In a next step and informed by the structured needs, challenges and wishes of the prevention-hub´s potential end-users, initial wireframes of the individual modules and the overall architecture of the prevention-hub were established by SYNYO. These were used to validate and refine the design of the prevention hub through discussions with potential end-users, like educators and members of civil society organisations, with whom an online workshop was organised by SYNYO, or during the INACH annual conference on the 15th of October 2020. 

After integrating the so obtained feedback, the design of the prevention hub was finalised, laying the groundwork for the subsequent development of the prevention-hub by SYNYO. 

As such, the final prevention hub consists of six main modules, namely the home module (landing page), a News & Knowledge section, the library module, a Stakeholder map, a Project Directory and the Consortium map. Each of the modules responds to a specific need of Re-ACT´s end-user groups, as identified at the beginning of the project [link to article NEW01005402EN Re-ACT 02], and have been jointly tested before the platform was made publicly available. 

Keywords

Remembrance, development, antisemitism, online hate, antigypsyism