Safe Digital City

Organisation

Nordic Safe Cities 

Nordic Safe Cities was established by the Nordic Council of Ministers following the terrorist attack in Copenhagen in February 2016 and has today evolved into an independent Nordic non-profit organisation funded by Nordic foundations, cities and the Nordic Council of Ministers. 

The Nordic Safe Cities alliance unites leading Nordic prevention professionals, build resilient local communities and assist cities in preventing polarization, hatred, and extremism. We exist to connect and unite Nordic leaders from across sectors and pioneer new solutions to safeguard democracy in cities across municipalities, civil society, youth, governments, and tech.

Type of Organisation: NGO

Project description

With the Safe Digital City program, Nordic Safe Cities aims to transform the existing prevention system in the Nordic countries to the digital and social media driven era. This involves analyzing online hatred, radicalization and extremism and then working with local stakeholders (municipalities, civil society, youth, and police) to prevent and govern online with the goal of strengthening our democracy and safety. 

Safe Digital City addresses the issues that arise when local debates undergo a mainstreaming of conspiratorial and hateful narratives, while dis- and misinformation is spread or recruitment into subcultures occurs. Together it fuels a polarized and hateful debate that challenges the state of our democracy and the crucial debates that are increasingly practiced on social media. 

Thus, Safe Digital City aims to prevent and counter online radicalization, hate and extremism and consists of three main pillars: 

1. Using a partially algorithm-based analytics design that examines hate and polarization across social media platforms, we map the scale and scope of the challenges: Where the hate is, what creates it, and who receives the hate. In other words, we map the battlefield in the "digital city". 
2. Secondly, we work closely with the cities to establish a structure where local actors can share this information and help create a digital mindset among prevention professionals and civil society, enabling professionals to translate their prevention work into the digital sphere. 
3. Finally, we aim to move prevention efforts online so that municipalities, police, and civil society find their preventive role online and start collaborating on safeguarding the digital democracy. We do this by working together to find digital pathways to existing prevention work and develop new initiatives that can adress the biggest challenges identified in cities.

Deliverables

• Verbal attacks and hate speech in the national public debate in Norway
• Local Digital Action Plan for the City of Malmø 
• Local Digital Action Plan for the City of Aalborg (in Danish) 

Contact details

Address

Nørrebrogade 45C 
DK-2200 Copenhagen,Denmark

Contact person: Sebastian Jørgensen
Telephone: +45 429 417 69
sebastiannordicsafecities [dot] org (Email) | Website