As part of the comprehensive morning news bulletin of Athens Radio, John Papageorgiou, Founder and Head of the Athens Digest, hosted and conducted an interview with Glenn Micallef, Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture, and Sport. The Commissioner was in Athens as part of the “Youth Dialogue” event, which took place on January 28. Below is the full content of the discussion.

Commissioner, first of all, thank you for the opportunity for this interview and welcome in Athens. What is the objective of your visit in Athens? What is the objective of today’s dialogue with the young people and how does it contribute to your mission?

First of all, John, I want to wish you and your listeners a very good morning. It’s actually great to be here in Athens, in the Mediterranean and in this in this wonderful city. It’s a city that is so full of energy. And later on today, I will host here in the Technopolis building my first youth policy dialogue with a group of young people coming from across our union where we want to put in practice our commitment as a as a union: the commitment to bring the union closer to young people, the commitment to give young people a greater roles and greater responsibilities in our societies, and to give them the opportunity to shape the union in their own voice, to contribute to the way that we take decisions, to contribute their ideas, to contribute with stories about their everyday lives, their realities, and to create this movement of young people who really want to deliver positive change in in our union and in our societies.

How effective, how useful this dialogue is? And I am asking this because the transatlantic developments have created an environment that may affect your mission as well.

First of all, I come from the European Commission. We are primarily as a college, but also as a Union focusing on making our Union stronger. We have a strong Union, a strong family of member states that represent different populations around our union, but we are all united by our shared values, the values of equality, respect, human rights, democracy. And this is what defines us. We are proud to hold these values. Naturally, this does not mean that we live in isolation. We are surrounded by partners across the world, including the United States. I think that we need to focus on what unites us with our partners, including those across the Atlantic, where possibly sport and culture could have a role. Both these two areas have this wonderful ability to bring people together, to help strengthen our transatlantic relations. We have a wonderful opportunity in the next Olympic and Paralympic Games that will be held in the United States. But let’s focus on bridging, let’s focus on finding what unites us with our partners across the globe.

Let me also focus on one topic that I think is a key priority, according to your mission letter as well, tackling cyber bullying. This is related with young people, with people of the age that you are going to have a dialogue with in a while. You have been asked to contribute to the EU wide inquiry for the broader impact of the social media. Therefore, you have to engage with the tech giants. And the EU framework is much more regulated than the framework that what these giants would like to have, or they have in the U.S. How does this affect your mission and how are you going to deal with this?

Addressing your question, I think we have to determine what the starting point of this debate is. And the starting point to this discussion on social media, but also a little bit broader, is that in our societies, we have to make sure that there is no place for hatred, there is no place for violence. So, whether it’s virtual or whether it’s physical, this has no place in our society. Now, there’s ample evidence that excessive screen time – and we’re not speaking about the use of our technologies for education- can have negative physical, social and psychological effects on our societies, particularly on those youngest in our societies. As you’ve mentioned, John, we have a regulatory framework that already gives us a basis to start this engagement with very large online platforms and search engines. We have legislation that allows us to determine how these platforms designed their algorithms, how they designed the age verification systems, how they vet content to ensure that it is age appropriate. But also, to control things like addictive design which has these negative effects on our societies. The work that we will be doing in the next institutional cycle will focus on having a new wide inquiry on the broader effects of social media, to understand better how this is affecting our populations. And my focus will be on developing an action plan against cyberbullying. This is a phenomenon that is growing rapidly in our Union. We need to find out best practices of things that have been implemented to address this challenge in different member states and implement them across the board in our union. We need to define what cyberbullying is because right now there’s no one definition that is accepted across our union and we have to work with these platforms. We have to engage with these platforms through dialogue to find out how we tackle this problem effectively. So, ιn all we do, whether it’s its youth policy, whether it’s culture, whether it’s the regulation of online search engines and online platforms. engagements like these are absolutely crucial. And through them, we can find out ways to address these challenges that we face as a society.

Another priority is the intergenerational solidarity. Easy to say, but practically, what does it mean? Concerning your portfolio, how do you intend to integrate these objectives?

When we speak about intergenerational solidarity, the term I mean, this may sound like something that is bombastic, but it’s actually something that comes out of our treaties. And in practice, what we mean by it is that we want to give everyone in our society a voice. We are living in a society where for the first time we have multiple generations living at the same time, in the same society, also because of demographic trends. This is a good thing in our society. Greater longevity. People are living longer because the quality of life is better. But at the same time, we have declining birthrates. So, that means we have to rethink our policies. We have to rethink our education policy. We have to rethink maybe to span our education across a wider period of time, not just focus on it in the early days of our lives. We have to think about our housing policies. We have to think about our public expenditures, not to put the burden of care on the younger generations and have this skewed disproportionately, putting a greater burden on young people. We have to think about the environment and climate change. These things are central to work in this area. So in in my mind, this work on intergenerational fairness will involve three pillars. First of all, ensuring that every generation has equal opportunities. Ensuring that generations live together in the same society in harmony, understanding one another, not putting generations against each other or blaming generations for the challenges that we face. We have to understand that we need to work together. And the third is having trust in public institutions to actually address these challenges. That comes through dialogue, that comes through engagement, that comes through communication, which is why in the first phases of my work on this priority, on intergenerational fairness, we were tasked with a scoping exercise to define the themes that will be the pillars on which we will base our strategy in the in the next months of our work.

And finally, recent local and national elections across the EU has shown that a significant portion of youth supports extremist political forces. What’s the primary reason for this and how are you going to take this into consideration, making decisions as commissioner?

First of all, I must reiterate something that I mentioned in our conversation a little bit earlier. We live in a union that is based on values. The values of equality, the values of respect, the values of tolerance. And, of course, we can have different opinions. Yes, that is the beauty of our democracy. We can, discuss issues and discuss how to address our challenges, but we do it in a respectful way. We do it in a way that respects what we believe in and what we, we stand for. I think the way that things are shaping out in the union does put some concerns into our minds. But the answer is in our cultures, the answer is in our identities. I think this has a power to bring us together. We can, through dialogue, understand one another and then come up with things that can address the challenges that maybe are leaving these vacuums that are filled with extreme ideas. So, this is why processes like the one that we will have today in Athens are so important. Because this discussion, this engagement, this communication, this understanding, this debate is healthy for our societies. It’s healthy for our democracies. The more of it that will combat the vacuum that is filled up by these extreme views in our societies.

Commissioner, thank you very much for our conversation.

Thank you, John.