Finland is teaching media literacy in preschool and adding artificial intelligence literacy as schools and media outlets look to help people recognize disinformation, particularly in a region shaped by tension with Russia.
The AP said the Nordic country has woven media literacy, including the ability to analyze different kinds of media and recognize disinformation, into its national curriculum for students as young as 3. The program is designed to make Finns more resistant to propaganda and false claims, including claims that cross the 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) border with neighboring Russia.
Finland’s teachers are now tasked with extending those lessons to artificial intelligence literacy. The AP linked the shift to Russia stepping up its disinformation campaign across Europe after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago, and said Finland’s move toward NATO membership in 2023 provoked Moscow’s ire, though Russia has repeatedly denied interfering in other countries’ internal affairs.
“We think that having good media literacy skills is a very big civic skill,” Kiia Hakkala, a pedagogical specialist for the City of Helsinki, told The Associated Press. “It’s very important to the nation’s safety and to the safety of our democracy.”
At Tapanila Primary School, north of Helsinki, teacher Ville Vanhanen taught a group of fourth graders how to spot fake news. During the lesson, a TV screen beamed a “Fact or Fiction?” banner as student Ilo Lindgren evaluated the prompt. “It is a little bit hard,” the 10-year-old said.
Vanhanen said his students have been learning about fake news and disinformation for years, beginning with reading headlines and short texts. The AP described a recent class in which the fourth graders were tasked with coming up with five things to look out for when consuming online news to ensure it’s trustworthy, as part of a progression toward AI literacy.
“We’ve been studying how to recognize if a picture or a video is made by AI,” Vanhanen said. The AP reported that the instruction is moving from spotting fake content toward assessing whether images or videos might have been created by AI.
The AP also said Finnish media contribute through outreach efforts such as an annual “Newspaper Week,” when papers and other news are sent to young people to consume. In 2024, Helsinki-based Helsingin Sanomat collaborated on an “ABC Book of Media Literacy,” distributed to every 15-year-old in Finland as they began 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,” Jussi Pullinen, the daily newspaper’s managing editor, said.
Media literacy is also part of Finland’s broader education culture, the AP said. The article said it has been in the national curriculum since the 1990s, with additional courses available for older adults who might be especially vulnerable to misinformation.
The AP said Finland, with a population of about 5.6 million, regularly ranks at the top of the European Media Literacy Index. It said the index was compiled by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria, between 2017 and 2023.
Finnish Education Minister Anders Adlercreutz said the scale of disinformation was not anticipated in advance. “I don’t think we envisioned that the world would look like this,” he said, adding that he had not expected to be “bombarded with disinformation” and to see “our institutions” challenged, with “our democracy really challenged — through disinformation.”
Martha Turnbull, director of hybrid influence at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, told the AP that detecting falsehood is already becoming more difficult. “It already is much harder in the information space to spot what’s real and what’s not real,” she said, while also arguing that “right now” it can still be “reasonably easy to spot the AI-generated fakes because the quality of them isn’t as good as it could be.”
Turnbull said the challenge could worsen as AI tools develop. She added: “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.”