MinDiShield Targets Disinformation about Minorities

The EU-backed project gives special attention to religious minorities facing online hate, manipulation and extremist narratives.

A new European project is placing minority communities at the centre of the fight against online disinformation, with particular attention to religious minorities whose identities are often distorted, weaponised or targeted in digital spaces.

MinDiShield, short for “Combating Online Minority-Related Disinformation,” is a two-year EU-funded initiative running from 2025 to 2027 across Belgium, Cyprus, France, Greece and Italy. Its stated aim is to strengthen resilience among minority communities by equipping professionals, community leaders and minority groups themselves with practical tools to recognise harmful narratives before they spread further.

The project arrives at a moment when online disinformation is no longer understood only as a problem of elections, foreign interference or viral falsehoods. For minority communities, it can become something more intimate and dangerous: a mechanism through which suspicion is normalised, stereotypes are repeated, and religious or ethnic identity is reframed as a threat.

A project built around communities

MinDiShield brings together educational institutions, civil society organisations, media specialists and policy actors. The consortium includes SYMPLEXIS in Greece as lead partner, the Media Diversity Institute in Belgium, the Centre d’Action et de Prévention contre la Radicalisation des Individus in France, CESIE ETS in Italy, Cyprus University of Technology, and Metropolitan College in Greece.

Its target groups are deliberately broad. The project is designed for media-literacy and social-support professionals, such as educators, social workers, psychologists and community workers; for ethnic and religious community leaders; and for members of minority communities themselves. That structure reflects one of the project’s central ideas: resilience against disinformation cannot be built only by asking vulnerable individuals to “be careful online.” It requires trusted intermediaries, informed local leadership and institutions willing to listen.

According to the project’s own materials, MinDiShield will develop training and awareness resources, an interactive online toolkit, multilingual materials, and a transnational Community of Practice. The resources are expected to be available in English, French, Greek, Italian and Dutch, with a stated emphasis on multicultural accessibility.

Religious minorities in the information storm

The project’s special relevance for World Religion News lies in its explicit inclusion of religious minority leaders, including Muslim, Jewish, Hindues, Scientologists and other community figures, as part of its resilience-building work. In European public life, religious minorities often face a double burden online: they may be targets of hostile disinformation, while also being portrayed as sources of danger, extremism or social division.

That distinction matters. A false claim about a religious minority is not merely an inaccurate post. When repeated through social media, algorithmic feeds and politically charged commentary, it can affect how neighbours, public officials, journalists and institutions perceive an entire community. For small or already marginalised religious groups, the damage may be especially severe because they often lack the communications infrastructure, legal resources or media access available to larger institutions.

MinDiShield does not present religious minorities only as victims. Its model gives community leaders an active role as resource persons, knowledge multipliers and local anchors of trust. That is particularly important in religious communities where information often travels through personal networks, congregational life, family ties, cultural associations and faith-based leadership.

The project’s focus on “pre-bunking” is also significant. Instead of responding only after a falsehood has spread, pre-bunking seeks to prepare people in advance by showing them common manipulation techniques, emotional triggers and misleading frames. For religious minorities, this may mean learning how narratives about identity, loyalty, migration, security or public morality are constructed before they appear in a specific viral incident.

Training before the next crisis

MinDiShield’s planned activities include collecting media-literacy best practices, analysing awareness levels among ethnic and religious minority groups, identifying skills gaps among professionals, creating training materials and building an online toolkit. The project also aims to train professionals and community leaders who work directly with minority communities.

Its expected impact is modest in scale but targeted. Project descriptions refer to at least 40 community or religious leaders, at least 75 professionals, more than 100 minority-group members, a digital Community of Practice, hundreds of participants through physical dissemination events, and wider outreach through online channels. Those numbers suggest a pilot-style intervention rather than a mass public campaign.

That may be one of its strengths. Disinformation affecting minority communities often circulates in local languages, private groups, closed networks or culturally specific contexts that broad public-awareness campaigns do not reach. A smaller project with multilingual tools and community-based participation may be better positioned to understand how particular rumours, stereotypes or extremist narratives take root.

The EU’s wider digital debate

MinDiShield is unfolding within a wider European effort to address harmful content, disinformation and online hate. In 2025, the European Commission and the European Board for Digital Services endorsed the integration of the Code of Practice on Disinformation into the framework of the Digital Services Act. The Commission has also linked the revised Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online to the same regulatory environment.

Those policy moves focus largely on platforms, transparency, systemic risks and illegal content. MinDiShield occupies a different but complementary space. It is less about enforcement and more about social resilience: helping communities, professionals and local leaders understand how disinformation works, how it affects minority groups, and how responses can avoid deepening mistrust.

The project also addresses artificial intelligence and algorithmic technologies, calling for policy recommendations that safeguard equality and non-discrimination in media formats and tools. That point is likely to become more urgent as synthetic content, automated recommendation systems and generative AI make it easier to produce persuasive falsehoods at scale.

From protection to participation

One notable feature of MinDiShield is its language of participation. The project states that minority-group members should have their voices heard, their concerns addressed and their needs reflected throughout the project lifecycle. That approach is important because initiatives on extremism or disinformation can sometimes treat minority communities mainly as objects of risk management.

For religious minorities, the difference is not cosmetic. A programme that speaks about communities without them may unintentionally reproduce the same distance and suspicion that disinformation exploits. A programme that works with community leaders, listens to minority members and uses culturally adapted materials has a better chance of building trust.

There is also a delicate balance to maintain. Countering extremist narratives is a legitimate public concern. But when religious minorities are discussed primarily through the vocabulary of radicalisation, governments and civil society actors must take care not to reinforce the idea that minority faith identity itself is a security problem. MinDiShield’s broader emphasis on media literacy, critical thinking, multilingual resources and non-discrimination may help keep that balance in view.

The project’s success will depend less on the existence of a toolkit than on whether it becomes useful in real community settings: a youth worker responding to a rumour spreading on a messaging app; a religious leader helping congregants distinguish criticism from hate; a teacher discussing stereotypes without inflaming them; a journalist recognising when a minority is being used as a symbol in a wider political campaign.

A practical test for Europe

MinDiShield is not the only European initiative addressing hate, disinformation or minority protection. Its importance lies in the way it connects those issues. It recognises that religious and ethnic minorities are not simply affected by digital manipulation from the outside; they are often made into the raw material of disinformation campaigns, used to provoke fear, anger or distrust among wider publics.

For Europe’s religious minorities, that reality is already familiar. A single rumour about a mosque, synagogue, church, temple or minority association can travel faster than any correction. A distorted image can outpace an official statement. A misleading post can turn a local incident into a supposed civilisational conflict.

MinDiShield’s answer is not censorship, nor a promise that technology alone can solve the problem. Its answer is preparation: train the people closest to the communities affected, build multilingual resources, share best practices across borders, and bring minority voices into the design of the response.

That makes the project worth watching. In an online environment where religious identity is increasingly pulled into culture wars, conspiracy narratives and extremist messaging, the defence of minority communities may depend not only on laws and platform rules, but on whether people have the knowledge, confidence and trusted networks to recognise manipulation before it does lasting harm.