Finland Fights Fake News with Media Literacy Programs Starting in Preschool

Finland’s fight against disinformation begins in preschool, with media literacy programs designed for children as young as three years old. This decades-long educational approach is now expanding to include artificial intelligence literacy as the country faces increased propaganda threats, particularly from neighboring Russia.

The comprehensive anti-misinformation curriculum serves as a national defense strategy for Finland, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia. Finnish officials view these educational efforts as essential to protecting both national security and democratic institutions.

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

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago prompted an intensification of disinformation campaigns across Europe. Finland’s 2023 ascension into NATO further strained relations with Moscow, though Russian officials consistently deny interfering in other nations’ internal affairs.

At Tapanila Primary School in northern Helsinki, teacher Ville Vanhanen guides fourth-grade students through exercises designed to identify fake news. Students evaluate media content under banners reading “Fact or Fiction?”

“It is a little bit hard,” admits 10-year-old student Ilo Lindgren.

Vanhanen explains that his students have been learning about disinformation for years, starting with basic headline analysis before advancing to more complex evaluations. Recent lessons have focused specifically on artificial intelligence.

“We’ve been studying how to recognize if a picture or a video is made by AI,” Vanhanen says, highlighting the rapidly evolving nature of misinformation threats.

Finnish media organizations actively support these educational initiatives. The industry organizes an annual “Newspaper Week,” providing news content directly to young people. This year, Helsinki’s leading daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, collaborated on a new “ABC Book of Media Literacy” distributed to all 15-year-olds entering 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.

This nationwide commitment to media literacy has positioned Finland as a global leader in combating misinformation. The country consistently ranks at the top of the European Media Literacy Index, compiled annually by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria, between 2017 and 2023.

The Finnish approach is comprehensive, extending beyond schools to include courses for older adults who may be particularly vulnerable to disinformation. These skills have become deeply embedded in Finnish culture over decades of consistent education.

Education Minister Anders Adlercreutz reflects on the unforeseen challenges that made these programs so vital: “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.”

As AI tools rapidly advance, educators and security experts are racing to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated threats. Martha Turnbull, director of hybrid influence at the Helsinki-based European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, warns that the challenge is growing more complex.

“It already is much harder in the information space to spot what’s real and what’s not real,” Turnbull says. “It just so happens that right now, it’s reasonably easy to spot the AI-generated fakes because the quality of them isn’t as good as it could be.”

She points to an ominous trend on the horizon: “But 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 educational strategy represents a unique approach to national defense—one that arms citizens with critical thinking skills rather than solely relying on traditional security measures. As information warfare evolves with technological advancement, this model of building societal resilience through education has drawn increasing international attention from countries facing similar challenges.