Evan Spiegel (Founder and CEO of Snapchat) in Florence

Together with Andrea Ceccherini, Spiegel met with a delegation of 400 students from Italian upper secondary schools representing those taking part in the "Il Quotidiano in Classe" (“newspaper in classroom”) project, with whom he met as equals, as has long been the style of this series of meetings.

The initiative, moderated by the editor in chief of Corriere della Sera, Luciano Fontana, focused on the importance of knowledge and awareness of the tools offered by the web and their correct use, especially among young people. Another hot topic of the meeting was how to help young people distinguish quality information from fake news, especially in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

"With Quotidiano in Classe we try to open young people's eyes wider to the world and to enthuse them about the facts happening around us, to nurture their curiosity and thirst for knowledge and to develop their critical thinking," commented Andrea Ceccherini, President of OPGE, “By showing them how three different information sources tell the exact same news differently. It is an exercise, ours, to train a generation to think, to reflect, to meditate, to use their heads more. And it is above all a way to keep young people inside and not outside society, to make them actors and not spectators, to make them citizens and not subjects”.

 “At Snap, we believe that access to accurate information is a critical part of a democratic society. We started from the premise: online information has undergone a profound evolution and it is increasingly difficult today to understand what is true and what is not. That’s why on Snapchat, we make sure that content published  in the public parts of our app has to respect  stricter content guidelines. We also feature content from trusted news organisations and have deliberately built the app to prevent the spread of fake news.” explained Spiegel.

The event, which inaugurated the 24th edition (school year 2023/2024) of the media literacy project "Il Quotidiano in Classe" involving 18 newspapers (Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Il Sole 24 Ore, Quotidiano Nazionale, La Stampa, Il Giorno, Il Resto del Carlino, La Nazione, Il Messaggero, Il Mattino, Il Gazzettino, Il Secolo XIX, L'Arena, Brescia Oggi, Gazzetta di Parma, Gazzetta del Sud, Giornale di Sicilia, Il Giornale di Vicenza) saw the participation of the leader  the world’s most popular visual messaging platforms and was part of a series of meetings promoted for several years by the Osservatorio Permanente Giovani-Editori (OPGE), the leading organisation in media education and economic and financial literacy projects in Italian secondary schools.

Alongside OPGE over all these years, no less than 18 foundations of banking origin, in addition to ACRI (Italian banking association), have never failed to lend their support. They have wished to share with our organisation the value and strategic significance of this initiative, which aims to help a generation grow intellectually freer and more in control of itself.

In recent years, Andrea Ceccherini and OPGE have enabled Italian school students involved in its projects to meet some of the most important representatives of the hi-tech world, publishing, and the great leaders of the Silicon Valley, from Eric Schmidt (former executive chairman of Google) to James Murdoch (former CEO of Century Fox and News Corp) to Jan Koum (co-founder of WhatsApp), Steve Jobs' widow, Laureen Powell Jobs (founder of Emerson Collective) and Tim Cook (CEO of Apple).

Evan Spiegel is an entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of technology company Snapchat, which has over 400m daily users and over 750 million monthly active users. The main feature of Snapchat is to allow users to send ephemeral, photos and videos messages.

Andrea Ceccherini is the founder and president of the Osservatorio Permanente Giovani-Editori, an organisation that wants to help make today's youth the citizens of tomorrow, developing their critical spirit and civic sense. With this spirit, the media literacy project, 'Il Quotidiano in Classe' (The Newspaper in Classroom), was born, an initiative that brings the country's most authoritative print and digital media into Italian secondary schools. Many of Andrea Ceccherini's meetings with international personalities, from Tim Cook to Christine Lagarde, have taken place over the years to support and share his ambitious projects.