The workshop was facilitated by Ebru Özdeş from the project team and Ezgi Kan, who is responsible for the foundation's "Towards a New Discourse and Dialogue" project. Workshop participants were selected from the applications made to the open call.
After the introduction, the research coordinator of the project, Ebru Özdeş, made a presentation about the Media Watch on Hate Speech Project and the monitoring of hate speech in the media. She talked about how to monitor hate speech in the media, what are the basic elements of the methodology, and the foundations of the conceptual position of the project. With the presentation, the group made a general introduction to the concepts of discriminatory discourse and hate speech. Moreover, the function of the media in society was highlighted, and the ways in which news could produce, legitimize, and re-spread hate speech and discriminatory speech were discussed. Ebru Özdeş shared the general observations of the research on how the discourse of the media and the language-specific examples of hate in the news reinforces discrimination against disadvantaged groups.
After the presentation, she started a discussion on the news pre-selected by the project team. This discussion environment started with participants interactively placing selected news samples on a scale. Afterward, different views were discussed and thus the general problems and needs in news transformation were elaborated while highlighting how diverse the perspectives could be.
The group, after the break, started a joint discussion. Group started the second part to create an alternative pluralist discourse from the section of hate speech detection and analysis. Ezgi Kan, project coordinator for the "Towards a New Discourse and Dialogue" project went over the points that should be considered while producing alternative discourse and listed the steps of thinking about how to produce an alternative rights-based, pluralistic and inclusive discourse to the news we are examining. From this point of view, the facilitators introduced a worksheet prepared previously by the workshop team. Then, the facilitators divided the group into two to work on an alternative discourse generation worksheet. The groups who completed various steps such as analyzing the problems, selecting the target group and source while producing a new discourse, then presented their work to the other group.
In the last part of the workshop, verbal feedback was collected both as a subject of hate speech and specific to the workshop.