Finland is winning the war on fake news. Other nations want the blueprint

Building successful resistance to fake information begins with primary education. Finland’s national school curriculum encourages information and media literacy along with critical thinking. The pilot program consists of training teachers, journalists, civil servants, and others in information literacy. The curriculum emphasizes three categories of fake news: misinformation (mistakes), disinformation (lies), and malformation (conspiracies).

France is at the forefront of efforts to integrate internet literacy into standard primary and secondary course requirements. By partnering with journalists and educators, the French government is working to stop the spread of misinformation by teaching students how to identify misleading tweets, articles, and other sources.

The coronavirus pandemic has invigorated organizations working in the Baltics to counter disinformation, particularly from Russia, by flagging suspicious accounts, fake news, and hate speech. For example, Covid-19 led hundreds of Lithuanian medics to a group called the Elves to flag disinformation about the virus and related government responses. The groups partner with and receive funding from local and international sources, including Facebook and the Google News Innovation Fund. Some question whether highlighting stories, websites, and user accounts as fake might actually help to disseminate them further.

Wikipedia’s large number of volunteer editors document history in real time, while making sure different viewpoints are considered and avoiding misinformation. While other social media sites are hesitant to label unreliable sources and misinformation, Wikipedia clearly labels controversial and unproven topics and deploys many tools to avoid false information. A single page per topic makes monitoring easier, pages can be locked from new edits, and people who frequently make false edits can be banned. While it doesn’t claim to be a reliable source, editors do follow policies meant to keep out anything untrue.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites defended against election-related disinformation campaigns by quickly identifying and removing fake accounts and putting labels and warnings on posts that made false claims of voter fraud and premature claims of victory. Instead of frictionless usability, they slowed or shut down core parts of their products such as limiting political ads, tweaking recommendation algorithms, and/or preventing sharing and comments on questionable posts. Threats will continue in the weeks ahead, but the companies have prevented widespread disinformation campaigns so far.

Several groups are working to counter disinformation aimed at the Black community by spreading accurate information and elevating local voices as trusted messengers. Organizations have disseminated accurate information via social media, used hackathons and video game launches to get Black and other youth of color interested in voting, provided shareable content to progressive organizations, and created a guide to help people identify fake accounts and bots. Nonprofit First Draft also provides a two-week disinformation training course in English and Spanish with daily lessons sent by text.

To combat the spread of conspiracy theories, researchers at Cambridge’s Social Decision Making Lab have created an interactive game that puts users in the shoes of "manipulators" to teach them how to "question social media posts that have the hallmarks of engineered virality." Although experts say playing the game just one time will likely not result in sustainable change, a similar game that focused on understanding how fake news was created found that users' beliefs in fake news decreased by an average of 21%.

The NewsRun is “a daily newsletter that summarizes Pakistan’s major stories of the day." It’s helping Pakistani people stay on top of the news. Some Pakistani people who live in the country get overwhelmed with the daily news cycle, while Pakistani’s living abroad might have a language barrier or lack the context to understand the news. The clear, direct language of the newsletter makes the news accessible. "The way it’s written is clear and it highlights all the key points I need to know." The newsletter has thousands of Instagram followers and a “20 to 30 percent daily open rate.”

Correcting "data voids," which provide the space for conspiracies to flourish online, requires online platforms to take active measures against misinformation. In the face of digital marketing incentive structures and biases in search algorithms, scientific journals can’t produce enough content to dispel assumptions of false equivalency between science and propaganda, creating a data gap. Pinterest is currently one of the few companies trying to correct this imbalance between settled science and misinformation campaigns characteristic of many online social media platforms.

Independent journalists and upstart news organizations in Mexico have banded together to counter potentially deadly or disruptive fake news with a highly organized fact-checking campaign calling itself Verificado. Besides debunking hundreds of false political rumors in the 2018 elections, the coalition has fact-checked the sort of fake news that has prompted mobs to carry out hundreds of lynchings. One WhatsApp fact-verifying account enabling anyone to submit requests for debunking stories has been used extensively by mostly young readers.