Green Tick Agency for Health, (Physical) Activity (Sports) and Diet

young people increasingly rely on digital apps and social media for information about health, diet, and sports. While some benefit from this access, others are adversely affected. However, there is a significant gap in research and policy that needs to be addressed to understand the relationship between young people, social media/digital apps, and their health impacts. As a result, unregulated content continues to circulate freely on social media and digital platforms. As such, modeled after the World Anti-Doping Agency's methods for evaluating supplements used by athletes, Green Tick will verify whether health, diet, and sports-related content on these platforms are convenient, reliable, and confirmable. This project is positioned as a pathfinder in digital content regulation, aiming eventually to act as a control mechanism.

The Green Tick project is a pioneering initiative designed to regulate and assess the content related to health, sports, nutrition, sleep, exercise, body image, weight loss, diet, and physical activity on social media and digital apps. The 24-month project consortium includes seven partners from across Europe: two from Turkiye and one each from Greece, Portugal, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain.

Green Tick proposes the establishment of an umbrella organization tasked with distributing the Green Tick label. This label will be awarded to social media accounts and digital apps that provide verifiable and reliable content in the designated areas. The overarching goal of the Green Tick project is to enhance knowledge and understanding of physical activity, health, and diet among young people throughout the EU. This is expected to lead to increased participation in sports, conducted in a healthy manner. The project will support these goals by providing guidelines, training, and regulatory mechanisms, thereby ensuring that the digital landscape becomes a safer and more reliable space for accessing health-related information.