How to raise fact-checkers — learning from Finland

In a recent news report, CBS News visited a Finnish elementary school where media and information literacy are integral to the curriculum, beginning as early as six years of age.

In the story, a group of 10-year-olds demonstrated a command of languages, both Finnish and English, and could ask critical questions to separate facts from fiction. In one example, a student told the host that he did not believe the news that aliens landed on Earth 10 years ago. If they had, his reasoning went, someone would have seen them by now.

In another instance, a student assessed a webpage that claimed the 2020 US elections were rigged. She identified the source as a far-right website with a track record of publishing disinformation which left her sceptical about the report’s veracity.

According to the Finnish Minister of Education, the country considers media literacy a basic civic skill in today’s digital world and the foundation of its democracy in today’s world of propaganda and fake news.

Disinformation is far from a new phenomenon. The earliest historical instance of disinformation / malinformation was when the serpent in the Garden of Eden misled Adam (a.s.) and Eve (a.s.) into eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge which saw them expelled from Heaven.

Since then, every new communication technology -- from handwritten books to the printing press, newspapers, radio, television, the Internet, social media platforms, and, most recently, Generative AI tools capable of generating text, images, and videos -- has contributed to lowering the cost of dissemination per idea while simultaneously spreading them faster and wider. Since none of these technologies will be rolled back any time soon, the best defense against disinformation is an informed and aware citizenry.

Information and media literacy (IML) enables people to process information critically, spot bias and identify instances of unintentional misinformation and intentional disinformation and misinformation, popularized as ‘fake news’. However, basic literacy remains a prerequisite of IML which we, as a nation, continue to struggle with.

In February of this year, market research company Ipsos published the results of a survey it conducted for Voice of America titled ‘Political participation and landscape of Pakistani youth’. Among the key findings of the survey was that while most women get their news from TV, men prefer to turn to social media platforms.

Among social media platforms, 46 per cent were reported to rely on WhatsApp, followed by 40 per cent using Facebook, and eight per cent turning to Twitter / X. WhatsApp is by virtue of being an IM platform unmoderated. The user experience of social media platforms differs significantly from one market to the next. For the Pakistani market, moderation of Facebook and Twitter / X content is barely detectable – that is: overflowing with disinformation.

IML gets only a token mention in school curricula. Variants of a much-feted curriculum included scattered mentions of media literacy that tied it narrowly to Grade VII and VIII computer studies. The stated outcome was to “Evaluate digital media bias and messaging”. However, soon after that, the realization struck that most public schools do not have computers, not to speak of Internet access. Only 81 per cent of children start school in grade I, and only approximately 40 per cent of those reach grade VIII, and in turn only a small fraction of those will have the privilege of attending a school with the resources to teach computer studies. This is the footprint of IML education in public schools.

In 2019, Unesco published a broad set of guidelines in a report titled ‘Global standards for media and information literacy curricula development guidelines’ and the North-South Centre of the Council of Europe published a ready-to-use toolkit for ‘Media Literacy for Global Education.’ Most suggested activities in that toolkit require pen and paper and the ability to stomach conflicting opinions.

While access to the internet enables additional learning activities, IML does not depend on access to computers and the Internet. Essential elements of it have been part of school curricula in many countries for decades.

Middle school children in Western Europe have been sensitized to the political leanings of their local and national newspapers by comparing a day’s news coverage, spotting biased language describing the same events, and learning to discern between objective reporting, opinion, sensationalism, and outright propaganda as part of their language subjects. Beyond an isolated lesson, reading texts critically is embedded across school curriculums, particularly in history, literature, and more sensitive subjects.

Our state’s conflicted attitude towards combating the epidemic of disinformation / fake news is complicated by the fact that today almost every party - where the term ‘party’ is used in the broadest sense - has a hand in feeding narratives and commentary with various degrees of slant into the social media machine. Surviving it requires the ability to think critically and that is a rare beast in a country where many are stumped by sarcasm.

This begs the question: could the public school curriculum itself, long known for its indoctrinating effect, survive scrutiny by a critically thinking populace? Are the people in power prepared for its implications?