There is a particular kind of knowing that only comes from having lived through something.
Hamisa Mobetto knows what it feels like to open her phone and find her name attached to a rumour she never started. Watching a comment multiply into hundreds before she has even finished reading it. To feel, in real time, how quickly a public platform can turn into a place of judgement.
“I have myself experienced the dark side of social media,” she says. “I know how words, rumours and online attacks can affect a woman.
Hamisa Mobeto
She could have looked away. Instead, she is choosing to look closer — and to bring young people, especially young women and girls, along with her.
Through her collaboration with UNESCO, Hamisa is turning what happened to her into something young people can use: a clearer sense of how to spot misinformation, how to respond when cyberbullying starts, and how to protect themselves and each other online.
“I do not want to speak only for myself,” she says. “I want to speak for the girl who has not yet found the courage to use her voice.”
Ask any young person and they will tell you the same story, in different words. The internet gave them a door — to friendship, to learning, to a first small business, to a version of themselves the world hadn’t met yet. But somewhere behind that door, another version of the internet was waiting too: the misinformation, the harassment, the humiliation that spreads faster than anyone can stop it.
For those who step into public visibility, as Hamisa has, the risk grows sharper. For girls and young women especially, online abuse doesn’t just hurt in the moment. It teaches silence. It makes the next post harder to write, the next opinion harder to share.
Hamisa has lived on both sides of that visibility. She knows its reach. She knows its cost.
“Hamisa has had a massive platform for a long time,” says her manager, Noel Mangoma, “but what we are focusing on now is how to use that platform for something more meaningful.”
Knowledge as protection
UNESCO’s approach to Media and Information Literacy begins with a simple belief: no young person should have to choose between being connected and being safe.
What they need instead are skills. The instinct to pause before believing something. The habit of checking before sharing it. The ability to recognise, quickly, when a conversation online has crossed a line.
These are quiet skills. But they add up to something powerful. A pause before a rumour gets forwarded. A question raised before a provocation is repeated. A young person choosing to speak up for someone being bullied, instead of scrolling past.
That is the idea behind three words UNESCO keeps returning to: Pause. Think. Share. Not a warning to log off. An invitation to log on differently.
It is easy to forget, sometimes, that a screen has someone on the other side of it — a young woman still building her confidence, a student just finding her voice, a young person carrying more than she has told anyone.
Remembering that person is what safer digital spaces are really about. And it is what Hamisa brings into rooms that do not usually hear from her. Her reach carries UNESCO’s message somewhere policy papers rarely go — onto the very platforms where young people already live, create and speak.
