ROMA, Italy - s4story -- In the heart of Rome this afternoon, young designers, educators, and policymakers came together for Thinking Through the Noise, an event that placed people, not technology, at the centre of the conversation about disinformation, critical thinking, and the future of ethical AI.

Hosted at UNINETTUNO, the gathering highlighted Europe's commitment to empowering citizens, nurturing digital literacy, and strengthening democratic resilience.

Opening remarks from Francesco Saverio Nucci of UNINETTUNO, and Peter Friess of the European Commission set the tone for the afternoon: defending information integrity begins with giving people, especially young people, the tools to reflect, question and make sense of the digital world.

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Building on this, Massimo Magaldi, TITAN Coordinator, presented the core achievements of TITAN, an EU-funded project that has spent the past three years designing an AI-based Citizen Coach grounded in human-centred values. TITAN's work focuses on helping individuals strengthen their own judgement by engaging in structured, Socratic-style dialogues that encourage curiosity and self-reflection. A live platform demonstration by George Petatis of NCSR "Demokritos" showed how the Coach sparks deeper thinking, guiding users to examine credibility, biases and the reasoning behind online content, without dictating what to believe.

At the emotional heart of the event was the award ceremony for the Critically Yours design challenge, an international competition, endorsed by Sapienza University of Rome and the Cumulus Association. The challenge invited young creators to imagine new ways of making media literacy engaging and accessible.

Teams submitted interactive prototypes and short films that brought media literacy to life through storytelling and playful learning. The jury selected two outstanding entries for the first-place awards. The first winner, Filtered Realities (by Soni Sakshi & Haripriya Dabbiru, National Institute of Design, India), offers an immersive interactive experience where users toggle between distorted and accurate versions of the same news event, demonstrating how framing, emotional triggers and manipulation can subtly shift meaning. The second winner, OneMinute (by Qin Longyue, Ohio State University), presents critical thinking as a temporal, embodied and intentional act, via a web-based interactive journey that invites users to pause, reflect and respond to disinformation through the lens of the TITAN Socratic AI coach.

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"With the support of the European Commission, TITAN has demonstrated that human-centred AI can strengthen democratic resilience. What we saw today is a community, especially young creators,  building solutions that put people's judgement and autonomy first," said Magaldi.

In the closing discussion, participants reflected on how critical thinking can become a core digital skill for all Europeans.