The SHIELDed project works to protect valuable, yet vulnerable, communities from hate-driven violence by addressing its root causes and reinforcing the values of respect, diversity, exchange, dialogue, and cooperation. Through collaboration across the security, civic, educational and religious sectors, we seek to enhance the protection of soft targets, safeguarding symbolic places of personal and religious development and freedom, while also promoting mindsets that mitigate extremism and division.

The use of the Internet and online ecosystems by terrorist and violent extremist actors has become increasingly complex, intersecting with a broad range of harmful narratives, violent content and online subcultures. These risks are compounded by limited content moderation capacities, systemic gaps in awareness of what constitutes harmful and unlawful content, linguistic and cultural challenges, and weaker partnerships between governments, civil society and information and communication technology companies.