In May 2022, #defyhatenow lead team members from Berlin, South Sudan, Cameroon and Kenya met in Nairobi for the first time since the project was initiated to create an amalgamated initiative #ONEdefyhatenow and register a non-profit in Kenya whose principal mandate is to create awareness of responsible use of social media platforms and discourage the use of hate speech and words intended to incite feelings of contempt, hatred, violence or discrimination against a group or community in digital and physical forums.
This meeting focused on multi-country project collaborations, which would address specific issues in the target countries and how the initiatives would work together in their different locations and co-create projects that can be tailored to different contexts. There were discussions on how different roles would cross-pollinate as advisory to build up new initiatives and how global activities, such as the #PeaceJam, would be organised to represent the entire initiative.
The #defyhatenow Social Media Hate Speech Mitigation Field Guide and the Early Warning Early Response systems are some of the tools that offer strategies to be used by community-based organisations and other stakeholders for peacebuilding. These tools would be contextualised for varying contexts to tackle conflict, support media literacy, address issues of migration and displacement and leverage various fact-checking alumni networks created through the initiative.
The #ONEdefyhatenow team is working towards creating unanimous actions to support sustainable community-based conflict mitigation strategies worldwide.
