Finland Most Resistant to ‘Fake News,’ Report Finds

The United States and much of Western Europe – including the United Kingdom, France and Germany – ranked in a lower tier with countries such as Latvia and Lithuania in an expanded version of the analysis, which measures countries’ susceptibility to false news reports.

The report, conducted by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria, looked at a number of metrics to determine the overall media literacy of European countries and six select countries outside of Europe. The institute, founded in 1990 after a grant by George Soros, used data from organizations such as the World Bank, United Nations and Freedom House to calculate scores across four different metrics: press freedom, education, trust, and political participation, with education weighted as the most important.

The highest-performing countries included Finland, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Sweden, Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Australia. Germany and Iceland were the highest-ranking countries in the second quartile of the index, while Italy and Israel fell to the third quartile of “transitional” countries with regards to media literacy. The latter two countries recently had elections in which the far-right came to power.

The report found that people living in countries with liberal democratic governments are “more likely to worry about misinformation than people in countries without or with limited democratic institutions,” and that fake news concerns were higher among people with higher education levels.

“It is worrying that the societies which are most vulnerable to the impact of fake news are at the same time the least concerned about the spreading and the impact of disinformation,” Marin Lessenski, author of the report, said in a press release. “This increases the risks related to disinformation in such countries, especially in the context of the war in Ukraine, as part of the public does not realize or just ignores its vulnerability.”

According to the report, the “dangers of fake news and related phenomena for democracy are hard to underestimate.” The countries where media literacy is at its lowest have the greatest restrictions on press freedom and low levels of education and personal trust.

The worst-performing countries were Georgia, followed by North Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Turkey, Montenegro, Moldova, Bulgaria and Serbia.

The Media Literacy Index was first published in 2017 and was expanded from 35 European countries to 41 in the most recent publication. It was created in the context of a number of trends in media literacy and consumption, including the disinformation campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, widespread confusion and mistrust during the COVID-19 pandemic and most recently, the Russian “infowars” occurring concurrently with the physical war in Ukraine.

In past years, the index advocated for education as the best way to address media literacy, rather than regulating free speech, as education would provide “vaccination” against the worst effects of fake news. However events such as the war in Ukraine, the analysis concludes, have shown that some regulation of media, including of social media, has “proved necessary while safeguarding rights and free speech to the extent possible.” The report cites the European Union’s ban on several Russian media broadcasts that were engaging in disinformation in February 2022 as an example of appropriate intervention.

This year, six countries outside of Europe – Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, South Korea and the United States – were also included in the analysis, for a total of 47 countries. Finland has topped the Media Literacy Index every year the rankings have been released, going back to 2017.