Finland Combats Fake News with Early Education in Preschools

Finland’s Media Literacy Fight Against Misinformation Starts in Preschool

The battle against fake news in Finland begins remarkably early – in preschool classrooms across the Nordic nation. For decades, Finland has integrated comprehensive media literacy into its national curriculum, teaching children as young as 3 years old to analyze different types of media and recognize disinformation.

This robust educational approach forms the backbone of Finland’s anti-misinformation strategy, designed to make its citizens more resistant to propaganda and false claims, particularly those originating from neighboring Russia, with whom Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) border.

Finnish educators are now expanding their curriculum to incorporate artificial intelligence literacy, responding to Russia’s intensified disinformation campaigns across Europe following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Finland’s 2023 accession to NATO further provoked Moscow’s displeasure, though Russia consistently denies interfering in other countries’ internal affairs.

“We think that having good media literacy skills is a very big civic skill,” explains 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.”

At Tapanila Primary School in a quiet Helsinki neighborhood, teacher Ville Vanhanen guides fourth graders through exercises designed to identify fake news. As students evaluate whether information is “Fact or Fiction,” 10-year-old Ilo Lindgren acknowledges the challenge: “It is a little bit hard.”

Vanhanen notes that his students have been studying misinformation for years, beginning with basic headline analysis and short texts. Recent lessons have tasked fourth graders with identifying five key factors to consider when consuming online news to verify its trustworthiness. The curriculum now incorporates AI literacy as well.

“We’ve been studying how to recognize if a picture or a video is made by AI,” Vanhanen adds, highlighting the rapidly evolving nature of digital literacy skills required in today’s information landscape.

Finland’s media organizations actively participate in these educational efforts. An annual “Newspaper Week” distributes news content to young people nationwide. In 2024, Helsinki’s leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat collaborated on the “ABC Book of Media Literacy,” which was given to every 15-year-old in Finland as they entered upper secondary education.

“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,” says Jussi Pullinen, the newspaper’s managing editor.

Media literacy has been embedded in the Finnish educational system since the 1990s. The initiative extends beyond school-age children, with additional courses available for older adults who may be particularly vulnerable to misinformation campaigns.

These skills have become so deeply woven into Finnish culture that the country of 5.6 million people consistently ranks at the top of the European Media Literacy Index, compiled by Bulgaria’s Open Society Institute between 2017 and 2023.

Finnish Education Minister Anders Adlercreutz reflects on the unexpected evolution of the information landscape: “I don’t think we envisioned that the world would look like this. That we would be bombarded with disinformation, that our institutions are challenged – our democracy really challenged – through disinformation.”

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence tools has created new urgency for educators and experts who are working to equip students and the general public with updated skills to distinguish fact from fiction.

Martha Turnbull, director of hybrid influence at Helsinki’s European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, notes the increasing difficulty of navigating today’s information environment. “It already is much harder in the information space to spot what’s real and what’s not real,” she says.

Turnbull cautions that while AI-generated fakes are currently identifiable due to quality limitations, that advantage is temporary. “As that technology develops, and particularly as we move toward things like agentic AI, I think that’s when it could become much more difficult for us to spot.”

Finland’s proactive, lifelong approach to media literacy represents a model increasingly studied by other democracies facing similar challenges in the digital age, where information warfare has become a constant reality.