Looking back with Mediajungle 2 years after winning the Dutch Privacy Awards

Everyone media savvy: media literacy in general and in people with mild intellectual disabilities in particular

The original mission of Mediajungle is still undiminished: making young people, children and adults with mild intellectual disabilities (LVB) digitally empowered and self-reliant. Through smart inclusive design, they also reach a wider target group. Mediajungle has started developing several products and has further expanded its team to include a media educator and a research expert. Their focus is to look at what content is needed to reach the LVB target group and develop appropriate tools for that purpose.

Mediajungle has developed a new interactive online platform where learning programmes can be followed. This is in addition to developing and publishing, for example, board and card games. The team is aware that there are different requirements for online programmes than for physically developed products. This diversity in the range of products on offer is an important development for reaching the target group.

This vulnerable target group is often the first to face specific new social problems. This signal is a precursor to the problems of a wider group.

The difficulty in distinguishing between factual news and disinformation does pose a major threat to the development of young people's worldview. Young people get their ‘world truth’ from social media channels, where public opinion is not optimally represented and fact-check is mostly an unknown word. Information channels from official bodies, for young people in general and the LVB group in particular, are very scarce and too little written in the language of the recipient.

Digital learning tools developed for the LVB group are limited because this target group is small(er). Moreover, it is very difficult to strike just the right chord: not childish, but understandable. This is where Mediajungle stands out and manages to bridge this gap, successfully.

The winning the Privacy Award has helped Mediajungle in increasing external exposure. In particular, the fact that an objective and independent jury pronounced on the quality, usefulness and necessity of their products and services weighed significantly. It gave them exposure to a wider audience than before and contributed to motivation for the employees who have worked so long and hard on this. An award like the Privacy Award helps enormously in boosting confidence in the organisation among external organisations, new customers and funds.

Young people today are not waiting for a long message with nuance. They prefer to be presented with short messages as bite-sized quick chunks on which they can decide for themselves whether they find it ‘something’ or ‘nothing’. Information developers must respond to this reality and take it into account. On the other hand, Mediajungle wants to teach them that the very truth comes with nuances. This requires more explanation and thus again in finding the right balance.

Classic sources still have the ‘editorial and factual’ scrutiny before it hits the airwaves. “Fast-food digital media” for young people does not have that. There is no fact check, no filter, no editorial review prior to publication. The flow of information on social media contains mostly personal opinions that hugely influence young people's worldview.

It seems you increasingly have to pay to properly protect your privacy. In most cases, due to complexity, the target audience that Mediajungle basically targets has neither the awareness nor the financial resources to protect their privacy optimally. That is the world upside down! An individual's privacy should be optimally protected in the basics, that is stipulated by law. So it is crooked that a citizen has to pay for that protection either directly (with money) or indirectly (with his/her data); this is unacceptable.

A current example is that with a paid subscription to Facebook (Meta), your privacy is better protected. You just have to be able to afford that. If you already have to make difficult choices every month about where to spend your money, you probably won't opt for a paid Facebook subscription. So there is still a long way to go and we need to be enormously keen that privacy does not become something for the ‘’happy few’’.

For candidates still hesitant to apply, Mediajungle says that applying for the Privacy Awards has led to better shaping their future plans and bringing up aspects they had previously paid less attention to. The reward of winning an Award, as well as being nominated in itself, is a culmination of years of work by the team at Mediajungle. This is something they are very proud of to this day.

For more information on the Dutch Privacy Awards, the participation criteria and an overview of all nominees and winners since 2018, visit PrivacyAwards | Privacy First.