How Finland is teaching its young to spot fake news

HELSINKI: Finland’s war against fake news starts from a young age. Schools in the Nordic country are teaching children media literacy.
The curriculum covers various topics, from questioning where stories come from to the right to freedom of expression.
One Finnish student said: “In today’s social media, everyone has their own kind of bubble, with its own ideologies. So knowing what is true and what is not true is very important.”
Finland is often held up as the benchmark for having a media literate population.
The country has topped the Media Literacy Index every year since the ranking system was first published in 2017.
The index compares 47 countries on factors such as education, media freedom, and the ability to resist disinformation.
To equip students with the skills to combat misinformation, schools across Finland are given the latest book, “The ABC Book of Media Literacy”, to teach the subject. 
Information literacy expert Susanna Ahonen, one of the driving forces behind the book, believes it is “in the Finnish DNA” to have an open and transparent media. 
“We are neighbours of Russia, and we know how the information environment in Russia is,” said Ms Susanna Ahonen, information literacy project manager at News Media Finland, a trade association of newspapers in the country.
“During the Cold War, people didn’t get any information. Nowadays they are flooded with information,” she added. “But the point is always the same, that if the people don’t know what’s really happening, you can do whatever you want. And to protect democracy, we have to fight that always.”
Funding for the book comes from News Media Finland, which believes that a well-educated readership helps the wider media landscape amid shrinking audiences and declining revenue.
Public trust in newspapers in Finland is among the highest in the world, with a strict system of self-regulation to uphold editorial standards.
Despite only having a population of just over 5.5 million, there are more than 200 different newspapers available across the country.
Teachers and publishers in Finland are aware that educating the next generation has to keep advancing to keep up with an evolving and increasingly complex media landscape. 
Mr Jyrki Poutanen, who took the lead on designing the latest media literacy book, said the subject has to keep up with the growing number of bad actors peddling potentially dangerous misinformation and rhetoric online. 
“It’s such an overwhelming load of media information that it still needs constant support to make people understand what’s going on,” Mr Poutanen, co-founder and chief creative officer at creative agency United Imaginations. 
“Especially now that artificial intelligence has sort of infiltrated our media landscape, the threats are even bigger.”