Using social media to fight against racism

A group of high-school students taking part WYRED projects within the Summer Youth University at Tel Aviv University decided to deal with the issue of racism.

Here is what they say:

“Racism gives rise to hatred that encourages violence. It also increases the gaps between different societies. We want to focus on racism in Israel among the youth. We believe that we, as teenagers, have the power to change society. When we discussed how to address the problem, many solutions came up and we chose what seemed to us to be a simple, accessible solution, one that we could also apply. That is why we have chosen to use social media, which neither requires large financial investment nor allows large audiences to reach. We want to address the issue with technology and the idea is to create an online lecture or podcast to raise awareness of the issue, using a special hashtag. We chose the hashtag #reveal_the_truth. In the podcast we will present points in history where racism raised its head and tell the listeners / viewers what were the awful consequences.

We propose to use the “challenge” trend where we challenge people to take pictures in a public place shouting “Don’t put a hashtag on me”. We chose this sentence because we are basically making headlines about people for no reason or because of racism. In addition, anyone who participates in the challenge will tell in the film about the stereotype or prejudice he or she encountered. We decided to shoot as a promo for the challenge, a short film, to describe the racism and stereotypes that each of us encountered, and so to convey the message.”