Youth Initiative

Cyprus Local Youth Project Initiative

Cyprus Youth Project Initiative, taking place by and with students of Lykeo Apostolou Louka Kollosiou.

4 February 2026

Diagnosed as part of Work Packages 1 and Work Packages 2 of the ongoing project, the young people of this project chose the topic of "hate speech, fake news and how to use social media responsibly" for the implementation of this local youth project initiative. This was because, as part of Cyprus' research during Work Package 2, a significant number of people, particularly youngsters, acknowledged widespread addictions to excessive social media use, especially TikTok and Instagram. This means, with it, there is an increase of online hate speech as well as fake news that comes along with extensive use of social media. For this local youth project initiative, the plan was to combat this specific problem when it comes to social media. This was identified as being tailored to the local needs, as misinformation leading to hate speech is what affects this area of Cyprus tremendously.

The task was simple, to be able to create products, serving as a "call to action" in the school. To start, fascilitators Boghos Avetikian and Nikolas Nikolaou, explained directly what are the terms hate speech, fake news and what responsible use of social media use entails.

Quite simply

Hate speech

• Words or phrases that directly insult and affect others
• Combats specific groups, such as a race, gender, religious group, or ethnicity
• Serves the purpose to ultimately reduce others, or offend above group, on facts that not only cannot be controlled, but make others feel worse merely because they belong to this group.

Fake news

• False information, or often modified information that may be based on true events
• Can appear online social media channels such as Instagram or TikTok, as well as TV or newspapers
• Exists to either cause fear, change someones political opinion, or simply to get more clicks

Responsible use of Social Media

• The idea that the above two should be avoided, such as only sharing correct information, and more importantly research information before sending it out.
• Searching for the original source, and understand what that specific publication gains by sharing this information.

The activity therefore followed the creation of posters created DIRECTLY by the students themselves to turn into a campaign in the school. Students argued, rightly so, when organizations, or even when the school themselves share such posters, it is often outdated, not taken seriously and ultimately has less impact.

As such, when posters are directly created by the students themselves, with the goal of affective other students, this makes the messaging more clear, more inclusive, and more impactful, because the content itself is directly made by youngsters FOR other youngsters.

Students split into 10 teams, to work on 10 different posters on the topic they wanted to impact the most.

Students then presented the posters one by one to the other groups, to teach them about the messaging, why they used the colors they did, why they wrote the phrases they wrote and more

Below you can see the 10 posters created by the groups.

These posters were then turned into an ongoing campaign, when during break (which is when all students are on school grounds) students stuck the 10 posters in a public space, and will remain there up until the end of the school year.

Below you can also access the evaluation of the local youth project initiative

translated questions

• How much did you like making the poster?
• How easy was it to understand the message of the workshop?
• How creative did you feel during the workshop?
• To what extend would you like to take part in similar activities?
• How much do you like activities of NGO ACPELIA which use non-formal education, such as this one?
• How was this experience for you? (Open answer)

Evaluation can be download here:

The timeline of the activity was as follows

11:00 – 11:20 – gather of participants and sign-up

11:20-11:35 – short presentation by ACPELIA team to ensure students understand the difference of the terms "hate speech", "fake news" and "responsible use of social media" correctly

11:35 – 12:10 – in 10 groups, participants work on creating their posters

12:10 – 12:30 – presentation of all 10 posters to all teams

12:30 – 12:40 – short anonymous evaluation of activity

12:40 – 13:30 – campaign at school, sticking posters in public space for all students to see.