"A decade after the beginning of the civil war, Syria remains among the most dangerous environments for journalists and media workers. Between 2011 and 2021, UNESCO’s Observatory recorded 113 killings of journalists. In its 2021 report, covering the years between 2011 and 2020, the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM) recorded 1,670 documented cases of media freedom violations committed by a variety of national and foreign actors. These include killings, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance and kidnapping, attacks on media headquarters, forced resignations, expulsions and deportations, as well as physical and verbal attacks.<NZ>The Syrian media landscape is characterized by its polarization and sectarianism, which severely limits the Syrian population’s access to independent and reliable information. A multiplication of media outlets has been noted in recent years, but these are generally under heavy pressure to support the dominant faction in their area. As a result, Syrians are often exposed to highly partial media content, as well as to varying degrees of inflammatory hate speech. In zones controlled by the Syrian government, information is controlled by the State press agency, and media must obtain authorization from the Ministry of Information to operate.<NZ>UNESCO’s response to these challenges has therefore been twofold: firstly, actions have focused on monitoring hate speech in Syrian media content in order to produce recommendations to counter it and thus prevent it from escalating conflict and hatred. Secondly, an action plan for the safety of Syrian journalists has been developed through multi-stakeholder consultations, which was completed by the development of a safety curriculum for Syrian journalism schools. UNESCO thus upscaled advocacy towards the prevention of hate speech in Syrian media through a monitoring project which started in 2017 and enabled the production of two monitoring studies in 2018 and 2020. In July 2019, the project brought together representatives of Syrian media at a meeting in Paris to discuss the outcomes of the first round of monitoring, which resulted in a consensus to put an end to this phenomenon and identify steps to curb it." (p.2)