Finland stops fake news - The Nordic Reporter

While everybody in the world is more or less influenced by fake news, there is one Scandinavian country that prides itself in dealing with it successfully: Finland. Sharing an extensive border with Russia the land of the 1001 lakes is long accustomed to the outside (read: Moscow) trying to clout things.

Click to listen to my radio talk (in Dutch)
Scroll down to the podcast of 17 December, 00:07:23 into the broadcast
VRT Radio 1, Nieuwe Feiten, 17 December 2019, presenter Lieven Vandenhaute

The success of Finland to stop all the mayhem that disturbs the news is based on several pillars. For starters: like in neighbouring Scandinavia kids already are trained in critical thinking of what the sources of information are. Teachers normally stimulate the students to look for information themselves, to check the credibility of the source and double-check if it produces fake news or not.

Moreover the trust in both media and official organisations is still relatively big in Finland. While the media in neighbouring Sweden are somewhat sensational in bringing the news, Finnish media are normally a bit more “boring”. Plus the Fins, used of balancing between Russia and the West since ages, are more accustomed to nuances in how to view Russia. The big powerful neighbour is treated with more respect, without losing critical thinking.

To help this critical thinking the Finnish government launched training courses in how to handle fake news and to recognize deep fake. About 10,000 people have already gone through this program, being guides to others. In March last year Helsinki even launched the awareness campaign The World’s Best Election, motivating Fins to think why the Finnish democracy is great and how to keep it that way.

Discarding fake news with the sword of wisdom is what the Fins believe have succeeded in. The land of the 1001 lakes might now be less open to strange “fairytales”. | © 2020 Marcel Burger, nordicreporter.com. Feature photo by JIP

GREENLAND, 12 SEP 2023: Cruise ship Ocean Explorer with 206 people on board has gone aground in the Alpefjord of Greenland, where the Nordøstgrønland National Park is situated, on Tuesday. The Danish military - Greenland is a semi-autonomous country, under Danish rule - has sent patrol vessel P570 Knud Rasmussen to the area. But it will take days for it to sail the more than 1,200 kilometres (about 650 nautical miles) to the Ocean Explorer. The Danish Arctic Command hopes the vessel is able to get itself free with high tide.

FINLAND, 11 SEP 2023: Three neo-nazis stand accused in Finland for preparing a terror attack, that included shooting the then Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin. The trial against the three men, of which the main suspect was a candidate for the so-called True Finns political party, started in the court of Päijänne-Tavastland. All suspects are Finnish and key-evidence is there own statements, intercepted Telegram communications between the suspects and 3D printed guns. The men are 21, 26, 28 years old. A 66-year-old man is suspected of aiding, but does not stand trial in this case.

SWEDEN, 11 SEP 2023: Ten people are accused of killing a 15-yr-old boy in a sushi restaurant in Skogås, as Stockholm suburb, in January. The ten are between 16 and 27 years old, and include the 16-yr-old guy that pulled the trigger and killed the then equally old boy, investigators say. The police beliefs the hit was ordered and can be connected to the so-called "Kurdish fox" (kurdiska räven), which has been identified by Swedish police as a major crime boss. Of the ten suspects of this killing, only one remains at large. #shootingssweden

NOTE, 1 SEPTEMBER 2023:
Twitter ends. Over the past 13 years I used Twitter to bring you daily news, quickly and short, in addition to my web channel. First from Scandinavia, with Poland and the Baltic states added a few years ago. I have decided to leave Twitter/X. Once, it was a great, free and simple channel, easy to include in my website and accessible to all - even for those without a Twitter account. That were precisely the reasons why I used Twitter, during most of my 15 years as a correspondent/reporter based in Sweden, and even after I moved to Poland more than 2 years ago.
Recent changes dictated by Musk, and especially today's announcement that X will demand more privacy sensitive data from its users, have fuelled my decision.
If you have been one of my almost 1.6K regular followers of my daily tweets, which totalled more than 15.900, big thank you (!!!) for your confidence in me during the past dozen years.