In Finland, learning to question what you see and hear doesn’t start in high school—it starts in preschool.
For decades, the Nordic country has embedded media literacy into its national curriculum for children as young as 3, teaching students to interpret different types of media and recognize disinformation. The goal is to build resilience against propaganda and false narratives, including those that can spill across Finland’s 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) border with Russia.
“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.”
A new focus: teaching AI literacy
Now, Finnish educators are being asked to expand those lessons to include artificial intelligence literacy, as concerns rise about how quickly AI tools can produce convincing fakes.
The shift comes as Russia has intensified disinformation efforts across Europe since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago. Finland’s entry into NATO in 2023 also drew anger from Moscow, although Russia has repeatedly denied interfering in other countries’ internal affairs.
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Inside a classroom learning to spot “Fact or Fiction?”
At Tapanila Primary School north of Helsinki, teacher Ville Vanhanen recently walked fourth graders through how to identify fake news.
With a “Fact or Fiction?” banner on a TV screen, 10-year-old student Ilo Lindgren weighed what she was seeing.
“It is a little bit hard,” she admitted.
Vanhanen said his students have worked on misinformation awareness for years, beginning with headlines and short texts. In one recent lesson, students were asked to come up with five things to check when evaluating online news for reliability. The class is now moving into AI literacy, which Vanhanen described as increasingly essential.
“We’ve been studying how to recognize if a picture or a video is made by AI,” he said.
News organizations join the effort
Finnish newsrooms also contribute to the nationwide approach. Media outlets organize an annual “Newspaper Week,” sending newspapers and other news materials to young people to read.
In 2024, Helsinki-based Helsingin Sanomat collaborated on an “ABC Book of Media Literacy,” distributed to every 15-year-old in the country as students 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,” said Jussi Pullinen, the newspaper’s managing editor.
A long-running strategy, reinforced by new threats
Media literacy has been part of Finland’s educational framework since the 1990s, and additional courses are also offered to older adults who may be especially vulnerable to misinformation.
The approach is so established that Finland—home to about 5.6 million people—regularly ranks at the top of the European Media Literacy Index, compiled by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria, between 2017 and 2023.
Finnish Education Minister Anders Adlercreutz said the scale of today’s information threats has outpaced what many expected.
“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.”
Experts warn that spotting fakes may get harder fast
With AI advancing quickly, educators and experts say the window for “easy” detection could close.
“It already is much harder in the information space to spot what’s real and what’s not real,” said Martha Turnbull, director of hybrid influence at the Helsinki-based European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. She said AI-generated fakes are often still identifiable because quality limits remain—but that may not last.
As those tools improve, she warned, emerging systems such as “agentic AI” could make deceptive content significantly harder to recognize.
Sources:
AP News / Finland’s battle against fake news starts in preschool classrooms
