SteRHeotypes Project. Detecting and Countering Ethnic Stereotypes emerging from Italian, Spanish and French Racial hoaxes

One of the Challenges for Europe should be to understand how media and fake news can reinforce prejudices against immigrants. The main objective of the STERHEOTYPES (STudying European Racial Hoaxes and sterEOTYPES) project, led by the ‘Aldo Moro’ University of Bari and funded by the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo ("Challenges for Europe"), is to promote awareness of the psychological processes generated by racial hoaxes, in the new digital generations, in three European Mediterranean countries: Italy, Spain and France. This paper presents the main findings aimed at (i) Understanding and countering factors associated to online racial hoaxes and online stereotypes through psycho-educational interventions in schools using an ad hoc designed web-app; and (ii) Investigating the features and dynamics of racist stereotypes through computational analysis based on novel annotated datasets that have been used to train automatic stereotype detection models in multilingual and multicultural perspectives.