Education on cybersecurity can raise citizens' awareness of potential cyber threats, and to a large degree, prevent them.
Cybersecurity attacks are one of modern life's greatest threats and their consequences vary greatly by age, sex, and gender. Human trafficking, cyberbullying, disinformation campaigns, and identity theft are just a few examples of the dangers on the internet today.
As the internet has become an essential part of our daily life, it is important to raise awareness and increase knowledge about online threats and vulnerabilities.
One effective solution to protect from such attacks is the integration of cyber education and basic programming courses into the school curriculum and awareness campaigns on disinformation throughout EU schools and universities. Another creative idea to embed digital literacy in the classroom is to honor and celebrate Digital Security Day in schools, and enhance learning via educational cartoons, especially for younger children.
Besides this, schools need to establish a new role: the digital teacher. The generation that has grown with new communication tools could be the best teacher about these technologies for a new generation that is still growing with and learning in the digital world.
Furthermore, there should also be free online course available in as many European languages as possible, which will focus on issues such as cybersecurity, data protection, digital privacy, and protection against disinformation. The most important is that this course should be taught in simple language in order to be understood by people of different ages and educational backgrounds.
Citizens should be taught how to think critically and use the internet safely, so that we can reduce the likelihood of being harmed by potential cyber threats. In other words, let's make people digitally literate!
From my point of view, as a rather old user of the internet (by 2010, since the age of 10) and of platforms embodying advanced algorithms today, such as Meta or Google, I believe that their mode of operation is likely to amplify some social imbalances. The constant recommendation, through these algorithms that analyse the viewing or consumption history, of the same type of content creates within these platforms some impenetrated groups, and even feed people from these groups with information of the same type, and at certain times only one sort of narrative was shown to them, which they will remember for a longer period of time. This ‘cage’ in which people are held, with these algorithms, are, from my perspective, extremely harmful to what democracy means and the free flow of information (they are no longer circulating alone, they are channeled by these algorithms).
In these circumstances, I believe that it is imperative to regulate the functioning of these algorithms, perhaps not only from the point of view of recommending content, but perhaps by sorting it, so that provocative content, which incites hatred or extremism, is no longer perpetuated.