Counternarratives & Capacity Building at the European Parliament

The Public Policy team, in coordination with the Anti-Racism and Diversity Intergroup (@ARDIEP2014_2019), hosted a training session in the European Parliament last week. We covered our policies, safety tools, and the various product innovations on Twitter primarily, but also Vine and Periscope.

Furthermore, we highlighted the recently launched updates to our product safety portfolio, such as the new and improved version of block, and multiple Tweet reporting, a new feature that empowers users to report several Tweets at the same time. The Twitter Media team also trained more than 300 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) during a Twitter Coaching Program, and 60 MEPs took part in one-on-one sessions with Twitter representatives who shared helpful information on using our platforms as a tool for amplification.

The training continued by looking at how the Twitter platform empowers people to speak truth to power (#BlackLivesMatter), create campaigns to combat hateful conduct (#NotInMyName), and to united in collective sympathy and solidarity with the victims of terrorism (#JeSuisCharlie). The #StopIslam hashtag, for example, began as a wilfully distorted view of the Muslim community by a minority of users and was quickly transformed into a rejection of Islamophobic online discourse by the majority.

At the end of the training session, attendees had the chance to ask questions, chat about their particular campaigns, and were given a copy of Twitter’s NGO Handbook: Campaigning on Twitter. We look forward to continuing our proactive engagement with the European Parliament and ARDI over the coming months.