Many local authorities continue to face challenges in countering negative narratives and hate speech. This workshop, co-organised by the Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities (ICC) Programme and ICEI, the coordinator of the Rete Italiana Citta’ del Dialogo, will bring together civil society organisations and local authority representatives to jointly deconstruct such narratives and explore effective responses. The workshop will specifically present the results of a relevant project implemented with cities in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Poland, focusing on the co-construction of new, inclusive narratives. The experiences of participating cities will be shared through concrete case studies, highlighting key lessons learned and transferable practices.

Please sign up also for the second part of this session (workshop F1 – 18 June, 16:00-17:30)

The digital space has grown hostile especially for women and LGBTI people, who frequently face online harassment, bullying, and hate, often fuelled by harmful stereotypes and prejudices, anti-gender narratives and disinformation. Such abuse hinders inclusive participation and undermines public debate and democratic resilience. This panel will discuss regulatory standards and good practices to combat online hate speech and to strengthen cross-sectoral coordination to foster safer and more inclusive online environments.

The thematic session explores experiences, opportunities and risks in using AI generated content to counter hate speech. Solidarity with OTHERS will present a policy report examining the role of AI-driven counter-speech in combating hate speech, and what its opportunities and limitations reveal about power, legitimacy, and governance in digital public spheres. ALIA Luxembourg as a market surveillance authority under the AI act, has analysed many aspects of deepfakes technology under the hate speech and disinformation lens. It has therefore prepared several procedures and measures to tackle ex-ante and ex-post such deepfakes through a transversal approach (surveillance, conciliation and awareness).

IPS Innovative Prison Systems will present their experiences in multistakeholder cooperation based on the project COOPERHATE “Multidisciplinary cooperation approach to prevent and counter hate crime and hate speech”. The project gathers national victim support, civil society, public authorities, tech and media partners to prevent and combat hate crime and hate speech. Furthermore, practical experiences of the Equality Council of Moldova in addressing discrimination, hate speech and incitement to discrimination will be shared, including cooperation between the Equality Council and the police in addressing cases of incitement to discrimination.

The workshop aims to promote and support the use of available resources (guidelines, studies and tools) to implement public information and awareness-raising initiatives and provide practical know-how on effectively designing narratives for campaigns. The workshop is based on one chapter of the “Key guiding principles on public campaigning against hate speech and hate crime” prepared by the Ministry of Interior Affairs of Austria, with the support of the European Commission, as well as, the awareness-raising and prevention measures outlined in the Recommendations on combating hate crime and on combating hate speech by the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers (CM/Rec(2022)16 and CM/Rec(2024)4),and the conclusions of the study on the effectiveness of counter and alternative narratives.