Finland has closely watched the Russian troll factory's efforts to create chaos in free democracies. We now educate our children to recognize #misinformation and rank #1 in our ability to resist it.
I wish the Americans would do the same.
@alasaarela Once again Finland is a good model. However Sweden and Nordics are also not too bad acc to the article. It appears to be important, as important as ever, to be critical to sources, to validate where info comes from and trust what is trustworthy and dismiss those that are not trustworthy. It is indeed important to trust as well as not trust. For everyone of all ages, and of course important to learn in school.
@alasaarela @hehemrin Unfortunately, teaching (young) students to differentiate journalism from non-journalism/mis & disinformation is not the same as teaching critical thinking.
The majority of today's journalists aren't critical thinkers (imho), so how can their journalism be? If the pre-20th century idea of miasma theory were still held as conventional wisdom/true, I believe the majority of journalists would interview "authoritative sources" and would then report that germ theory is quite possibly/probably misinformation. Even in the face of data demonstrating massively strong correlations otherwise. Data can manipulated therefore don't trust in it; rely on the authoritative sources. Journalists don't have the ability to analyze the data themselves to determine if it is manipulated or not. Or most of them don't, which is why wannabe authoritative news organizations should have data scientists on staff. And students should be taught how to determine the difference between the output of, say, ProPublica vs. The Economist vs. Helsinki Sanomat, for example. (Including the factors of daily vs. weekly, newspaper vs. magazine, ad vs. subscriber vs. crowdfunding revenue, etc.)
As an American living in Finland who is the father of a 13v Finnish child, I do not particularly see that my son is being taught (at school) to think critically about and to discern between great/average/bad journalism. As in, which journalists are data driven and properly challenge the conventional wisdoms held by authoritative sources, and which journalists are merely transcriptionists.
It is not a bad thing to be taught the difference between journalism and some rando on TikTok, but that should really be just the very start. (And we'll probably need to teach many of the teachers first…)
I'm very happy to be pointed towards any counterfactuals, suomeksi as well as English if there are examples of journalism critique that I haven't vicariously encountered yet. I don't yet know what's taught at the lukio level.
@hehemrin Exactly. We need to develop critical thinking skills and help our youth understand that they will be manipulated online if they are not careful. This has nothing to do with brainwashing to specific political stances, but rather helping people to avoid being manipulated.