A typical class by Saara Martikka, a teacher in Hameenlinna, Finland, goes like this: She presents journalistic reports to ninth-grade students. Together, they debate: what is the purpose of the text? How and when was it written? What are the core statements? “Just because it’s a good or cool thing doesn’t mean it’s true,” she notes.
In a class last month, she showed students three TikTok videos, and they all discussed the creators’ motivations and the effect the videos had on them. His goal, like that of teachers across the country, is to help students learn to spot false information.
In a survey published in October by the Open Society institute in Sofia, Bulgaria, for the fifth consecutive time Finland ranked first among 41 European countries in terms of resilience against misinformation. According to authorities, the success is not only the result of the educational system —one of the best in the world—, but also the result of a joint effort to teach students about fake news.
Media literacy has been part of the national core curriculum since preschool. “No matter what the teacher teaches — physical education, math or languages — you have to think, ‘Okay, how do I include these elements in my work with children and young people?'” says Leo Pekkala, director of the National Audiovisual Institute, which oversees media education.
After Finland, the highest ranked European countries for resilience to misinformation in the Open Society survey were Norway, Denmark and Estonia. The most vulnerable are Georgia, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Results were calculated based on scores for freedom of the press, level of trust in society, and for reading, science, and math.
The US was not included, but other surveys show that misinformation and misinformation have become more prevalent in the country since 2016 and that trust in the media is near a record low. An October Gallup poll found that 34% of Americans trust the mass media to report news fully, accurately and fairly. In Finland, 76% consider print and digital newspapers credible, according to an August survey commissioned by a group representing newspapers and conducted by IRO Research.
Helsinki has advantages in combating disinformation. Its public education system is among the best in the world. University is free. There is great trust in the government. And it was one of the European countries least affected by the pandemic. Furthermore, Finnish is spoken by 5.4 million people. “Stories with lies written by non-native speakers can sometimes be easily identified due to grammatical or syntax errors,” explains Pekkala.
Although teachers are required to teach media literacy, they are free to prepare lessons. Martikka says she tasked students with editing their own videos and photos to see how easy it was to manipulate information. Anna Airas, a professor in Helsinki, researched words like “vaccination” with students to discuss how algorithms worked and why early results were not always reliable. Others report that in recent months, with the Ukraine War, they have used Russian websites as a basis for debating the effects of state-sponsored propaganda.
Finland, which shares a 1,340 km border with Russia, developed its national goals for media education in 2013 and accelerated the campaign to teach students how to detect disinformation in the following years. Paivi Leppanen, coordinator of the National Education Agency, says the threat of Russian disinformation on topics such as Finland’s attempt to join NATO “has not changed the basics of what is done in the country, but it has shown that this is the moment for which everyone was preparing”.
While today’s teens grew up with social media, that doesn’t mean they know how to spot politically manipulated videos on TikTok and protect themselves from them. A study published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology pointed out that adolescence can be a peak time for conspiracy theories and that social media can be a contributing factor.
Still, the Finnish government points out that students are the easiest group to reach. (In addition to youth programs, the strategy uses libraries as hubs to teach seniors to spot misleading information online, according to Pekkala.)
For teachers, creating effective lessons is challenging. “It’s much easier to talk about literature, which we’ve been studying for hundreds of years,” says Mari Uusitalo from Helsinki. She starts with the basics—teaching students the difference between what they see on Instagram and TikTok and what they read in newspapers. “They really can’t understand fake news or misinformation or anything if they don’t understand the relationship between social media and journalism.”
In 16 years as a teacher, she has noticed a clear decline in reading comprehension, a trend she attributes to students spending less time reading books and more time playing games and watching videos. “With poorer reading skills and shorter attention spans, they are more vulnerable to fake news and not being knowledgeable about some topics to identify misleading or wrong information.”
When, last summer, his students were talking about videos showing Prime Minister Sanna Marin dancing and singing at a party, Uusitalo moderated a debate about how news can originate from videos circulating on social media. Some students believed that Marin was using drugs at the time, because they watched videos on TikTok and Twitter that suggested this – the prime minister denied it, and a test later came back negative.
Uusitalo says his goal is to teach students methods they can use to distinguish between truth and fiction. “I can’t make them think like me. I just have to give them the tools to make up their own minds.”
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
