RAN CSEP BRIEFING: PRECOBIAS – Prevention of Youth Radicalisation Through Self-Awareness on Cognitive Biases

The PRECOBIAS project aims to prevent and counter radicalisation by enhancing the digital resilience and critical thinking by unveiling mental processes and cognitive biases that underlie the interpretation and analysis of information. This awareness is paramount in helping individuals vulnerable to radicalisation to be able to “resist” the extremist discourses online.

The target audience of this project is young people (between the age of 15 and 25) and young people at risk of radicalisation in Italy, Belgium, Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland. To avoid scaring the target audience by using the name PRECOBIAS, which is clearly identifiable as an EU-funded project, the alternative brand BRAIN.FAIL was created to be perceived as trustworthy by the target audience. The BRAIN.FAIL campaign consists of a self-test for cognitive biases and a YouTube channel where the different biases are explained. There is also an Instagram Contest which is part of the social media campaign (see below).

This paper follows a briefing structure, in which it summarises the campaign, the main achievements of the project, the lessons learned on online campaigning in preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE), and links to some of the campaign messages.