Finland’s Fight Against Fake News: From Preschool Media Lessons to AI Literacy

Helsinki — Finland has long treated media literacy as a core civic skill, embedding it in the national curriculum from preschool so children learn to analyze media and recognize disinformation as early as age 3. That foundation is now being expanded to include artificial intelligence literacy as educators race to keep pace with rapidly improving generative tools and foreign influence campaigns.

Classrooms Building Critical Thinking

At Tapanila Primary School, north of central Helsinki, fourth-grade teacher Ville Vanhanen guides pupils through practical exercises to evaluate headlines, short articles and images. With a slide titled "Fact or Fiction?" on the screen, 10-year-old Ilo Lindgren described the task as "a little bit hard," reflecting the discipline’s steady climb in complexity as students progress.

Vanhanen said students begin learning to spot misleading headlines and biased reporting at an early age. More recent lessons teach children how to identify images and videos that may have been generated or manipulated by AI — a skill that teachers say is already essential and will grow in importance.

Schools, Media and the State Working Together

Finnish media also partner with schools to reinforce these lessons. An annual "Newspaper Week" exposes young readers to vetted journalism, while Helsingin Sanomat collaborated on a new "ABC Book of Media Literacy" distributed to every 15-year-old entering upper secondary school in 2024.

"We think that having good media literacy skills is a very big civic skill," said 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."

"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, managing editor of Helsingin Sanomat.

A National Strategy Against Disinformation

Media literacy has been part of Finnish schooling since the 1990s, and additional courses target older adults who may be especially vulnerable to false information. The approach is credited, in part, with Finland’s consistently high position on the European Media Literacy Index compiled by the Open Society Institute in Sofia between 2017 and 2023. The country — population about 5.6 million — seeks to make citizens resilient against propaganda, including campaigns that cross its 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) border with Russia.

"I don’t think we envisioned that the world would look like this," Education Minister Anders Adlercreutz said, reflecting on how disinformation now challenges democratic institutions.

AI Raises the Stakes

Experts warn that advances in AI will make distinguishing real from fake more difficult. Martha Turnbull, director of hybrid influence at the Helsinki-based European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, said that while many AI-generated fakes remain detectable today, improving quality and the emergence of more autonomous "agentic" AI will complicate detection.

"It already is much harder in the information space to spot what’s real and what’s not real," Turnbull said. "But as that technology develops ... I think that’s when it could become much more difficult for us to spot."

Finland’s model — combining early education, teacher training, media partnerships and public outreach — offers a practical example for other democracies seeking to shore up civic resilience in the era of rapid technological change.