Finland Is Winning Against Fake News. Why Aren’t We?

 
 
CNN has an excellent feature story out this week on Finland’s approach to countering the fake news phenomenon. It lays out some basic tools of a nationwide campaign for digital literacy. Their blueprint could prove useful to other countries dealing with this problem, whether it’s homegrown clickbait farms or election tampering by way of paid Russian trolls. Finland has a good track record here, ranking #1 in the European Media Literacy Index out of 35 countries for 2018. I have to imagine the US would be scraping the bottom of this particular scorecard.

The most depressing aspect of this article is learning about all of the things Finland is doing that we aren’t. The government of Finland started an anti-fake news initiative back in 2014, with the goal of educating its citizens, journalists and politicians on how to spot disinformation and how to fight back. This was two years before Russia’s meddling in the US presidential election. Wary of its neighbor to the east, Finland’s leadership saw the writing on the wall and decided to act.

What have we done? Given the chastening events of late, you would think that our own government would be leading the charge in facing down this crisis. Yet owing to a lack of executive priority, we’ve taken no meaningful steps as a nation. Instead, our chief of state can’t even give a straight answer as to whether he accepts that Russia interfered in our elections at all. For the sake of vanity, he’d prefer to believe Putin over 17 of our own intelligence agencies.

It doesn’t take deep political analysis to discern why Trump has trouble with this question, considering what we know of the man and how he responds to conflict. Acknowledging Putin’s involvement in swinging the 2016 election devalues his victory, and lends credence to the narrative that America has an illegitimately installed president. Not only is this too much to countenance, he’d sooner give up golf than be seen agreeing with a view associated with and hyped by ‘the left’. So instead of denouncing Russia’s actions as any respectable leader would, Trump resorts to the ‘if it makes me look bad, it didn’t happen’ defense. Rather like his base, he prefers soothing lies to uncomfortable truths.

It’s the same reason he attacked the Mueller probe from day one. Trump’s ceaseless hostility towards the investigation centered on the fact that it helped keep the Russia story alive. Indeed, its very existence guaranteed the conversation around Russian meddling — and therefore his status as president — would continue indefinitely. You could completely toss out the question of whether Russian actors were expressly aided by the Trump campaign, and it would not have altered his visceral disdain for Mueller and his team. From the perspective of Trump’s bite-sized intellect, anyone and everyone pursuing the Russia question was persona non grata, an affront to his electoral defeat of archnemesis Hillary Clinton.

But this brings us to perhaps the more conspicuous reason behind US complacency on the fake news front: the president is himself a prime purveyor of it. The Kremlin may traffic in propaganda and dezinformatsiya, but so does Trump.

On any given day, you’ll find his Twitter feed littered with retweets of tinfoil conspiracy theorists, alt-right personalities, and parody accounts. Even the majority of his followers — 61% according to one analysis — are bot accounts, spam accounts, or inactive. He gleefully spreads unfounded and unsourced stories for apparently no other reason than that the headlines and intro text are favorable to him and his administration. In short, Trump is the ten year old in Toys R Us who plucks whatever random items from the shelves that catch his eye and walks around the store with them for everyone to see, with no regard for which aisle they came from or how to put them back where they belong. It’s maddening.

And like many of his allies, the president has even co-opted the term to tar stories and reporters and news agencies he doesn’t like. The reliability of the reporting and its relation to fact are irrelevant in Trumpland; if it puts him in a bad light, it’s ‘fake news’. Completing this cycle of executive mythomania, Trump has on several occasions dismissed reports of Russia’s fake news operations as ‘fake news’. No doubt Putin is grinning ear to ear.

To put it simply, Trump is not going to address a problem that delegitimizes his presidency. Nor is he interested in pursuing an initiative that cracks down on an issue in which he is one of the star players. He doesn’t want to have this conversation and he doesn’t want the country to have it either. If that means letting actual fake news proceed undeterred, then so be it.

In doing so — in looking the other way on Russian intrusion into our democracy — he’s left the country vulnerable to future attack. He’s put his own ego ahead of the preservation of the free and fair elections on which democracies depend. That should in itself be considered an impeachable offense were it not for the polarized times in which we live. To truly understand why this administration’s inaction is so egregious, we have to understand the nature of the threat and what’s at stake.

It can be argued that in the modern era, information is the most powerful resource of all, more valuable than military hardware and the battalions that command it. And Russia sees the information sphere as key to their overall geopolitical strategy, with propaganda their golden weapon. As the experts who most closely follow this phenomenon have indicated, the Russian government’s target is to undermine the utility of the internet as a democratic space, and to drive a wedge between those states it considers an enemy.

For the 2016 election, Russia employed thousands of its own citizens and agents to take advantage of the ready-made tools available on leading social platforms in order to exploit American credulity. And their targeted misdirection worked wonders thanks to there being plenty of organic support for the ideas they pushed.

What Russia managed to accomplish during the last election cycle amounted to the biggest (and arguably most successful) trolling operation to date. And it was only the beginning. Concerted, multilayered influence efforts waged digitally from abroad — and our unique susceptibility to them — will be something to watch for years to come. Choosing to do nothing now increases the likelihood that upcoming elections will be similarly thwarted.

Looking ahead, whatever the president says, our intelligence agencies fully understand the threat and are taking it seriously, especially the Pentagon. But what’s really needed is a national preparedness campaign themed around trust, digital literacy, and critical thinking — just as Finland has done. Applying pressure to social media companies is a necessary but lesser part of the equation. After all, Finland has the same set of platforms available to them as we do, but they demonstrate a far superior ability to navigate those spaces without falling into the same traps as many Americans.

And at the local level? We’re on our own. It’s up to us to teach our students and our kids how to gather reliable information and be a responsible online denizen. In the age of fake news and Kremlin-sponsored troll farms, the critical assessment of information and sources is an imperative skill that must be diligently honed. As Jussi Toivanen, Finland’s chief communications specialist, told CNN, “The first line of defense is the kindergarten teacher.”

From the article:
 

“The initiative is just one layer of a multi-pronged, cross-sector approach the country is taking to prepare citizens of all ages for the complex digital landscape of today – and tomorrow. The Nordic country, which shares an 832-mile border with Russia, is acutely aware of what’s at stake if it doesn’t.”

[…]

“The small and largely homogenous country consistently ranks at or near the top of almost every index – happiness, press freedom, gender equality, social justice, transparency and education – making it difficult for external actors to find fissures within society to crowbar open and exploit.

Finland also has long tradition of reading – its 5.5 million people borrow close to 68 million books a year and it just spent $110 million on a state-of-the-art library, referred to lovingly as “Helsinki’s living room.” Finland has the highest PISA score for reading performance in the EU.

And as trust in the media has flagged in other parts of the globe, Finland has maintained a strong regional press and public broadcaster. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018, Finland tops the charts for media trust, which means its citizens are less likely to turn to alternative sources for news.”

 

 

Further reading: