Digital Peacebuilding

Use digital tools to address societal challenges

We use digital tools to address societal challenges. We bring people together into online dialogue and training programmes to empower individuals to tackle pressing issues that demand transformative action.

Our focus is on addressing online hate speech, discrimination, and racism in the Netherlands through our project, “The Digital Us.” For this initiative, we have developed a toolkit designed to help individuals effectively respond to online hate, discrimination, and racism encountered within digital spaces such as social media.

With this toolkit, we train young people in practical strategies for countering online hate and discrimination, mentor them during their activation phase, and measure the impact of their interventions in comprehensive reports. Alongside our focus on youth, we are also exploring partnerships with media organisations to support them in effectively countering hate on their platforms.

What participants say about our programme

“”I was bothered by online hate, but I was always afraid to speak out. What if I say it wrong or make someone angry? But through the exercises in the training, I felt that threshold getting smaller and smaller, and now I just do it.””

Participant, The Digital Us

2023 - 2024 | With The Digital Us, we piloted two formats to train youth to effectively stand up against online racism on Dutch Instagram. Besides having effectively trained youth to stand up against online racism, we have been able to test a new format of combining training and dialogue together with our partner Build-Up.

Go to The Digital Us

2024 - 2025 | With the Digital Us Academy we build upon our previous The Digital Us programme, but have expanded its focus to hate speech in Dutch digital spaces, including discrimination and racism. The Academy is using our new framework to step up against online hate, called RESPECT against hate, to train youth.

The Digital Us Academy

2025 - 2027 | We partnered with the University of Amsterdam, Build Up, Ich Bin Hier and FundiPau to apply for a CERV Grant under the priority "Promote civil society organisations’ awareness of, capacity building and implementation of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights" in September 2024. We expect the results of the review in February 2025.

Interested to work with us?

Contact us

Our partners in Digital Peacebuilding

Project execution

Build Up – Training design
DataValuePeople – Social media analysis
Represent! – Campaign / media strategy
Young Digitals – Campaign / promotion

Funding

VSBfonds – The Digital Us
Stichting Democratie & Media – The Digital Us
Fonds 21 – The Digital Us
Vfonds – The Digital Us
Maatschappelijke diensttijd – The Digital Us Academy

Like, Comment, Discriminate: Racist Discourse on Dutch Instagram

The Digital Us trains youth how to best go about intervening in racist debates. Bystanders become upstanders, and the burden of addressing online racism is no longer solely on the shoulders of its victims.