This continuous exposure to information can increase the likelihood of adhering to conspiracy theories, facilitate radicalisation phenomena, and "legitimise" hate speech. Therefore, it is essential to give young people the keys to question and put information into perspective and to develop their critical thinking skills.

InfoHunter offers a programme that immerses young people in an engaging and participatory experience. It is easy to use by educators, broadcasts online, and is now available in French and English.

Adopt the right reflexes

InfoHunter offers a five-step decoding process to develop your critical thinking skills and adopt the right reflexes.

• ON VIEW – viewing of a short video (true, false, ambiguous information...)
• ON VOTE – aiming to bring out the representations and launch the discussion around questions such as “is this information reliable?” or “would I share it?”
• ON INVESTIGATION – the video becomes interactive and coupled with a decryption tool, it allows to approach the main rules to know in order to properly decrypt any kind of information
• INVOLVED – young people answer the same questions and can dynamically compare the before/after results
• REMEMBER – students create their own analysis grid based on all the tips and tools discovered

Turnkey courses and a course editor to animate pedagogical sessions 

The InfoHunter program offers turnkey courses and a pathway editor to facilitate pedagogical sessions.

Turnkey courses 

For primary schools, the courses focus on the analysis of the image. They were created in partnership with Rose-Marie Farinella, a French school teacher (and #SaferInternet4EU Awards finalist) specialising in media education, based on a module of her pedagogical scenario "Info or intox, how to make the difference on the web, from elementary school onwards". It allows to acquire all the reflexes to decipher an image: source, framing, retouching, optical illusion, caption, and so on.

For high schools, the aim is to learn how to decipher information on the web and untangle true from false. This course is based on a fake documentary made by Thomas Huchon for the media Spicee and uses all the codes of conspiracy theories to spread false information.

A new middle school pathway has been prepared during 2020 for release in January 2021. It focuses on disinformation related to COVID-19. These courses are essential to understand the decoding process, the potential of the tool and to ensure the appropriation of the resource by educators.

This new content is produced in cooperation with Image’in (audiovisual centre dedicated to image and media education, member of the Oise Education League Federation) and Ligue de l’Enseignement (national movement of popular education, gathering 103 departmental federations), with the support of FFT (French Telecommunications Federation, committed with its members to protecting young people and raising awareness on Internet use).

A pathway editor for educators 

A pathway editor allows educators to fully customise the InfoHunter decryption process step by step.

They can:

• integrate their own videos to analyse a news item, a piece of "fake news", a documentary, historical archives;
• deconstruct hate speech, stereotypes;
• write their own voting questions;
• or build their own decryption grid from templates and tips built into the tool. 

The editor tool is designed to be easy to use and also to help train teachers in information decoding methodologies.

Illustration - The pathway editor for educators in InfoHunter. Copyright: French Safer Internet Centre

A programme recognised by the educational community

With more than 10,000 young people already participating in the programme, InfoHunter has been supported by the Ministry of National Education and the Ministry of Culture. Winner of numerous awards (the "Télécoms Innovations" prize from the French Telecom Federation, the SSE Inspiration Prize from the Media-Grand Paris cluster, the Facebook "Civisme en ligne" contest, and so on), the InfoHunter programme is still in development, through collaboration with popular education networks (such as the Ligue de l'enseignement), teachers, media, to better meet the needs on the ground.

In addition to previous prizes, InfoHunter just won the prize “Trophées du Numérique” 2020 in Canada.

Find out more about the work of the French Safer Internet Centre, including its awareness raising, helpline, hotline and youth participation services – or find similar information for Safer Internet Centres throughout Europe.