Finland’s approach to combating disinformation begins in its earliest classrooms, where children as young as three years old are introduced to media literacy skills. This decades-long educational strategy has positioned the Nordic nation at the forefront of the global fight against fake news and propaganda.

For generations, Finnish educators have woven critical media analysis into the national curriculum. The comprehensive program aims to make citizens more resistant to false claims and propaganda, particularly those originating from neighboring Russia, with which Finland shares an 830-mile border.

“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.”

The program has taken on new urgency in recent years. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago, Moscow intensified its disinformation campaigns across Europe. Finland’s 2023 ascension into NATO further strained relations, though Russia consistently denies interfering in other countries’ internal affairs.

In response to these evolving threats, Finnish teachers now face the additional challenge of incorporating artificial intelligence literacy into their curriculum.

At Tapanila Primary School in northern Helsinki, teacher Ville Vanhanen regularly instructs fourth-graders on identifying false information. During a recent lesson with a “Fact or Fiction?” banner displayed on a TV screen, 10-year-old student Ilo Lindgren acknowledged the difficulty of the task.

“It is a little bit hard,” the child admitted.

Vanhanen, who also serves as vice principal, explained that his students have been learning about fake news and disinformation for years, starting with analyzing headlines and short texts. The curriculum has evolved to include skills for evaluating AI-generated content.

“We’ve been studying how to recognize if a picture or a video is made by AI,” Vanhanen noted.

Finland’s media organizations actively participate in these educational efforts. The industry organizes an annual “Newspaper Week,” during which news publications are distributed to young people across the country. In 2024, Helsinki’s leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat collaborated on a new “ABC Book of Media Literacy,” which was given to every 15-year-old starting 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 newspaper’s managing editor.

The commitment to media literacy extends beyond children’s education. Additional courses are available for older adults, who may be particularly vulnerable to misinformation campaigns.

These efforts have yielded measurable results. Finland consistently tops the European Media Literacy Index, compiled by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria, between 2017 and 2023. This achievement reflects how deeply these critical thinking skills have become ingrained in Finnish culture.

Finnish Education Minister Anders Adlercreutz expressed surprise at how essential these skills have become in today’s information landscape. “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.”

The rapid advancement of AI tools has created new urgency for these educational initiatives. Experts are racing to keep pace with technologies that make distinguishing fact from fiction increasingly difficult.

“It already is much harder in the information space to spot what’s real and what’s not real,” observed Martha Turnbull, director of hybrid influence at the Helsinki-based European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. “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 warned that the challenge will only intensify as technology advances: “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 approach to media literacy education serves as a model for other nations grappling with similar challenges in an increasingly complex information environment.