Finland’s fight against fake news begins in preschool classrooms

HELSINKI — Finland’s long-running battle against fake news and disinformation begins as early as preschool, with media literacy embedded in the national curriculum for children as young as three years old.

For decades, the Nordic country has treated media literacy as the ability to analyze information, assess sources, and recognize false or misleading content as a core civic skill. The approach is designed to strengthen public resilience against propaganda and misinformation, particularly narratives crossing Finland’s 1,340-kilometer border with Russia.

As disinformation campaigns across Europe have intensified following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago, Finnish educators are now expanding the curriculum to include artificial intelligence literacy. Finland’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2023 further heightened concerns over hybrid threats, though Moscow has repeatedly denied interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.

“We think that having good media literacy skills is a very big civic skill,” said Kiia Hakkala, a pedagogical specialist for the City of Helsinki. “It’s very important to the nation’s safety and to the safety of our democracy.”

AI literacy as a growing priority

At Tapanila Primary School, in a residential area north of Helsinki, teacher Ville Vanhanen recently guided fourth-grade students through a lesson on identifying fake news. Facing a classroom screen labeled “Fact or Fiction?”, students were asked to evaluate the credibility of online claims.

“It is a little bit hard,” admitted Ilo Lindgren, 10.

Vanhanen said students are introduced to the basics of detecting misinformation from an early age, starting with simple exercises such as analyzing headlines and short texts. As they progress, lessons become more complex, focusing on source verification, intent, and reliability.

Now, the curriculum is evolving to address artificial intelligence.

“We’ve been studying how to recognize if a picture or a video is made by AI,” said Vanhanen, who also serves as the school’s vice principal. “AI literacy is quickly becoming a vital skill.”

Role of the media and public engagement

Finnish news organizations also play a role in strengthening media literacy. Each year, the country marks “Newspaper Week,” during which newspapers and other news materials are distributed to young people to encourage informed media consumption.

In 2024, Helsinki-based daily Helsingin Sanomat helped develop the “ABC Book of Media Literacy,” which was distributed to every 15-year-old student nationwide as they entered upper secondary school.

“It’s really important for us to be seen as a place where you can get information that’s been verified, that you can trust, and that’s done by people you know in a transparent way,” said Jussi Pullinen, the paper’s managing editor.

Defending democracy through education

Media literacy has been part of Finland’s education system since the 1990s, with additional training programs available for adults, who are often considered more vulnerable to online misinformation.

These efforts have helped Finland consistently rank at the top of the European Media Literacy Index, compiled by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria, between 2017 and 2023.

Finnish Education Minister Anders Adlercreutz said the scale of today’s disinformation challenges was not fully anticipated decades ago.

“I don’t think we envisioned that the world would look like this,” he said. “That we would be bombarded with disinformation, that our institutions are challenged, our democracy really challenged through disinformation.”

Experts warn that the rapid development of AI tools could further complicate efforts to distinguish fact from fiction.

“It already is much harder in the information space to spot what’s real and what’s not real,” said Martha Turnbull, director of hybrid influence at the Helsinki-based European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. While current AI-generated content can still be identified with some effort, she cautioned that future advances could make detection far more difficult.

“As that technology develops, and particularly as we move toward things like agentic AI,” Turnbull said, “that’s when it could become much more difficult for us to spot.”

For Finland, educators say the answer lies in starting early and treating media literacy not just as a classroom subject, but as a cornerstone of democratic resilience.