NGOs are a lot of things. One of the things that they are, is blindingly, mind-numbingly, profoundly idiotic. Our native European NGOs are bad enough, but we also spend untold millions funding absurd carbon-copies of these NGOs in other countries, and they are even stupider. It beggars belief.
Today, NiUS reports the amazing boondoggle that is Defy Hate Now, or rather, #defyhatenow, because most of the stupidest NGOs and their subsidiary projects have to stylise their names in absurd ways. #defyhatenow is an anti-hate-speech project in South Sudan “that works on providing community-based and data-driven solutions to the problem of hate speech, disinformation and countering online incitement to violence.” All of this in a country where only 12% of the population even has an internet connection.
The South Sudanese Hate Defiers have received 1.2 million Euros from the European Union since 2020, and a cool million since 2023. The money flows through the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument, or the NDICI, which is the main fund the EU maintains for funnelling millions of Euros to Africa for reasons nobody can understand. Before the EU awarded grants to #defyhatenow, the German Foreign Office was their main source of funding, which means that German taxpayers have been paying to combat internet hate speech and social media disinformation in a region where almost nobody is even online for a whole decade now.
It’s not totally clear what Defy Hate Now has used all of this money for. They claim to provide “(social) media literacy trainings,” “community level facilitation of hate speech and conflict mitigation activities” and “community-based and data-driven solutions to the problem of hate speech, disinformation and misinformation.” Among the sparse materials available on their website, we find this photograph of our Hate Defiers posing with an incorrectly realised cardboard cutout of a hashtag, I guess at one of their (social) media literacy trainings.
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