There is a moment, in any public initiative, when a bureaucratic announcement suddenly becomes something more personal—and that moment arrived on a Thursday in early October, when the Monegasque Government called a press conference that felt less like a formal briefing than a quiet act of civic imagination. Three Monegasque students sat at the heart of the room, preparing to step far beyond their familiar classrooms and onto a European stage:. Strasbourg, where they will join roughly one hundred other young Europeans for a Council of Europe conference on disinformation. Serge Robillard, speaking on behalf of the government, outlined the wider architecture of a project that had clearly been months in the making. Its title, “Youth Facing Disinformation,” captures both an urgency anda hope. It is part of the Council of Europe’s “Journalists Matter” campaign, launched in 2023, and it us developed during Monaco’s presidency of the organization’s Committee of Ministers. That may sound like institutional jargon, but it has real meaning: a country best known internationally for yachts, glamour, and a Grand Prix has chosen to use its moment of European leadership to confront one of the quiet crises of modern democratic life—the corrosion of shared fact. Artemiza-Tatiana Chisca, Secretary of the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee on Media and Information Society, was there too, a reminder that Monaco’s local efforts were woven into a much larger continental struggle. Also present were media professionals, independent experts, and the three students themselves, whose presence challenged the usual assumption that young people are simply passive victims of digital misinformation. The press conference laid out a programme that would explore role journalism and the particular challenges facing young people in an age of social feeds, algorithmic recommendation, and artificial intelligence. It was easy to imagine skepticism in that room: what difference can a handful of students make against viral falsehoods and engineered deception? But the answer being offered was not yet another plea for caution; it was a bet on experience. The bet is that those who have grown up inside digital culture possess a kind of lived knowledge that older institutions often lack—they know what a manipulated video feels like when it appears in their feed, how quickly a headline can be stripped of context, how a family argument can begin with a single forwarded message. By selecting these students, Monaco was signalling that youth are not merely an audience to educate but partners in understanding the problem.
Before the young delegates ever boarded a train for Strasbourg, however, the initiative began at home, inside Monaco’s own schools and public spaces. Two round-table discussions were organized in the Principality—one at Lycée Albert Ier and the other at the Médithèque Caroline—and they were designed, deliberately, not as ceremonial events with prepared speeches but as working sessions. These gatherings brought together the three selected Monegasque students with journalists, academics, and media specialists to examine, in concrete terms,how falsehoods actually travel. They looked at the way social media rewards outrage, the way digital platforms amplify extreme content, the way artificial intelligence can fabricate images, voices,and even entire news stories that feel more convincing than many real reports. At the core of these conversations was a question that has come to haunt anyone who cares about public trust: how do ordinary citizens distinguish reliable reporting from misleading or deliberately false information? It is a question with no simple answer, but the round-tables approached it with nuance rather than panic. They acknowledged something important: disinformation is not a natural disaster that simply happens to us,like a storm or an earthquake. It is a human creation, with a supply chain, a business model, and often a strategic purpose. Understanding it requires not only fact-checking techniques but also a certain emotional resilience, a familiarity with one’s own biases, and an ability to empathize with people who have been swept up by false narratives. The choice of venues was itself significant. A high school and a media library are not the kinds of places where official policy is usually made—but they are exactly the kinds of places where information habits are formed. By beginning the conversation there, the initiative acknowledged that addressing disinformation cannot be left only to regulators and newsroom executives;it must happen where young people already gather, with teachers, librarians, journalists, and peers. The three students who will represent Monaco in Strasbourg emerged from those sessions carrying not only credentials but also questions, impressions, anda sense of responsibility.
The real test comes next month, when the journey from Monaco to Strasbourg—short in kilometers but enormous in symbolism—reaches its destination. The Palais de l’Europe, the grand building that has hosted countless debates on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, will open its doors to around one hundred young people from across the continent. On 9 and 10 November, that institution will be transformed from a place where officials speak into a workshop where young citizens take the machinery of information apart. The participants were not chosen by chance. They went through an application process designed to identify people who already care about information integrity, people whose life experiences reflect broader youth realities and whose motivation goes beyond adding a line to a CV. They range in age from eighteen to thirty, and they bring with them different languages, different political traditions, different memories of recent history, and vastly different encounters with misinformation. What unites them is curiosity anda willingness to confront uncomfortable questions. They will sit beside investigative journalists who have spent careers tracing corruption and deceit; academics who study media ecosystems and the psychology of belief; social media specialists who understand recommendation algorithms better than almost anyone;and representatives of European institutions who carry responsibility for shaping policy responses. But the physical arrangement of the room will matter as much as the titles of the speakers. In practical workshops, participants will not receive lectures;they will be asked to analyze real cases, to map the journey of a rumor from obscure forum to national headline, to identify the moment when uncertainty hardened into false certainty, and to design counter-narratives that might have interrupted that journey. They will be encouraged to think like journalists—not because everyone should become a reporter, but because journalism offers a disciplined way of moving through an uncertain world: check the source, distinguish observed fact from inference, follow the money, issue corrections when wrong, and hold the powerful accountable. At its best, that kind of thinking is contagious, and the Palais de l’Europe, with its history andits corridors thick with argument, is an appropriate place for that contagion to spread.
What makes this initiative feel genuinely different is the philosophy buried beneath its logistics. For years, the debate about disinformation has tended to exclude the people most affected by it. Governments pass laws; platforms tweak policies; news organizations issue corrections—but young people, who spend extraordinary portions of their lives inside digital spaces, are usually treated as problems to be managed:. too naive, too impressionable, too quick to share something false. The Council of Europe and Monaco have chosen to invert that assumption. The explicit aim is to give young people something far more valuable than a seat in an audience: a direct role in examining how disinformation spreads and in developing ways to respond to it. That may sound like a subtle shift in wording, but it changes the tone of the entire project. Instead of being expected to absorb official messages, participants become co-researchers, co-creators, and co-critics. They are asked not simply, “Does this problem make you anxious?” but “What have you seen with your own eyes, heard with your own ears, and suspected with your own intuition? What do you believe should be done—and what are you willing to do yourselves?” That philosophy is also reflected in a video series launched alongside the programme. Cameras will follow the experiences of young Europeans as they arrive in Strasbourg, move through intense discussions, wrestle with ideas late into the evening, and perhaps experience moments of doubt, discovery, or solidarity. Why produce a video series about a conference? Because the organizers understand that hearing a young peer describe how disinformation affects her community is far more powerful than reading another official report. The sixpart? Actually original says “A video series launched alongside”; not count. We can say “a video series” no count. The series extends the conference’s reach far beyond those two November days, allowing classrooms, youth groups,and anyone with an internet connection to witness what happens when young people are trusted rather than lectured. In that sense, the video series is not merely documentation of the initiative;it is part of the intervention itself, a way of normalizing the idea that youth voices belong at the center of conversations about truth and trust.
Nor does this initiative end when participants board trains for home. If anything, November will mark the beginning of a longer experiment in youth-led action. After the Strasbourg conference, selected youth-led projects will become eligible for grants of up to €5,000. The sums are not enormous, and that is precisely the point. They are seed money for ideas that might otherwise expire in a notebook or a group chat: a local campaign to help grandparents recognize phishing attempts; a podcast in which young people interview journalists about verification; an art project that exposes algorithmic echo chambers; a school workshop where students share the most outrageous rumors they have encountered and then work backward to discover where those rumors began. The grants force participants to move from diagnosis to solution, from critique to construction. They also send a powerful message: the adults who designed this initiative trust young people enough to fund their ideas and let them lead. Monaco has committed €50,000 to support the wider programme, and while that figure may seem modest compared with budgets of platforms and governments, it is meaningful because it represents a deliberate investment in a particular approach—one that treats media literacy not as a box-ticking exercise but as a civic necessity. There is a certain humility embedded in this approach as well. No one believes a handful of small grants will eliminate disinformation. But the goal is to cultivate an ecosystem of initiatives scattered across Europe, each small perhaps, but each rooted in local knowledge and local relationships. A project born in a Monegasque high school will look different from one developed in a Polish university, a Portuguese youth association, or a Romanian media club;that diversity is not an obstacle but a strength. Combined, these small efforts may create a web of resilience that is far more durable than any single campaign, giving the entire initiative a future long after the conference hashtag has faded.
Finally, there is a moral dimension here that should not be lost in descriptions of workshops, grants, and schedules. Disinformation is so often discussed in abstract language—a “threat to democracy,” a “tool of hybrid warfare,” a “crisis of trust.” Those phrases are accurate, but they can distance us from what actually happens when a lie takes hold in a human life. A student in Monaco scrolls through social media and feels the ground beneath her certainty shift. A young voter some other country discovers that a vivid photograph she shared was generated by artificial intelligence, and she wonders what else she has gotten wrong. A family gathers around a dinner table and cannot agree on basic facts because each member has been living inside a different information universe. That is what disinformation truly does: it doesn’t only deceive individuals;it breaks the common world people need in order to talk to one another at all. The Council of Europe’s “Journalists Matter” campaign recognized this when it launched in 2023. It argued, in effect, that journalism is not a decorative accessory to democratic life but a core component of its immune system, as essential to public health as clean water or vaccination. Journalism alone cannot cure polarization or erase falsehood, but without journalism—without a shared baseline of verified fact—democracy becomes a cacophony of competing assertions and ultimately a contest of raw power. The initiative being developed during Monaco’s presidency extends that insight one step further. It says: journalism matters, and therefore media literacy matters, and therefore young people matter. The three Monegasque students who will take their seats in the Palais de l’Europe alongside nearly one hundred peers are not token representatives. They are witnesses, investigators, and ambassadors. Their trip to Strasbourg is not about leaving home;it is about returning with tools, relationships, and questions that will make home more resilient. In an age when so many institutions seem paralyzed by the speed of technological change, this project offers a refreshing reminder.: that the cure for disinformation begins with an ordinary but radical act—paying careful attention, asking hard questions, refusing to let a stranger’s algorithm decide what is true, and being willing to change one’s mind when evidence demands it. That is a lesson that travels far beyond Monaco or Strasbourg, and it gives these two November days the potential to echo for years to come.