Finland’s battle against fake news starts in preschool classrooms

Finland’s Fight Against Disinformation Begins in Preschool, Now Expands to AI Literacy

The battle against fake news in Finland starts in preschool classrooms, where children as young as three begin learning critical media literacy skills. For decades, Finland has incorporated the ability to analyze different types of media and recognize disinformation into its national curriculum, creating a comprehensive defense against propaganda and false claims.

This robust anti-misinformation program has become increasingly important given Finland’s 1,340-kilometer border with Russia, which has stepped up its disinformation campaigns across Europe following its invasion of Ukraine and Finland’s NATO membership in 2023.

“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 northern Helsinki, teacher Ville Vanhanen guides fourth-graders through exercises to identify fake news. While displaying a “Fact or Fiction?” banner, he asks students to evaluate various prompts. Ten-year-old Ilo Lindgren acknowledges the challenge: “It is a little bit hard.”

Vanhanen notes that his students have been learning about disinformation for years, beginning with analyzing headlines and short texts. Recent lessons have focused on developing five criteria to assess online news credibility. Now, the curriculum is expanding to include artificial intelligence literacy.

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

Finnish media organizations actively contribute to these educational efforts. During the annual “Newspaper Week,” news publications distribute materials to young people across the country. In 2024, Helsinki’s leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat created a new “ABC Book of Media Literacy,” which was distributed 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,” says Jussi Pullinen, Helsingin Sanomat’s managing editor.

Media literacy has been formally integrated into Finland’s educational system since the 1990s, with supplementary courses available for older adults who might be especially vulnerable to misinformation campaigns. This comprehensive approach has consistently placed Finland at the top of the European Media Literacy Index, compiled by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria, between 2017 and 2023.

Finland’s Education Minister Anders Adlercreutz reflects on the evolution of these challenges: “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 in teaching students and the broader public how to distinguish fact from fiction. Experts note that AI-generated content is becoming increasingly sophisticated and harder to detect.

“It already is much harder in the information space to spot what’s real and what’s not real,” warns 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.”

However, Turnbull cautions that as technology advances, particularly with the development of agentic AI systems that can act more independently, detecting artificial content will become considerably more difficult.

Finland’s proactive approach to media and AI literacy represents a model for democratic societies facing similar challenges. By equipping citizens with critical thinking skills from an early age, the Nordic nation has created a resilient population better equipped to navigate an increasingly complex information landscape dominated by both human and AI-generated disinformation.