The slide entitled “Did the Russian Trollian Army attack you?” included a list of methods utilized to deceive social media users: images and films manipulation, semi-truths, intimidation and false profiles. On the next slide, presenting a diagram of the website profile on Twitter, they explained how to identify bots (...). To emphasize the importance of the challenges of the information war, the lesson ended with a popular Deepfejek – an highly realistic, manipulated video of Barack Obama.
The Finns launched a programme preparing citizens to fight false news already eleven years ago, in the year of annexation of Crimea. They teach children and adults how to admit pseudoinformation spreading propaganda and divisions in society. The authorities of a state over 1300-kilometre-long border with the Russian Federation realized that if they did not realise people, Moscow would have an open way to the hay of confusion in their heads. American experts were hired to advise officials on how to make strategies. Reforms of the education strategy were besides made, putting more emphasis on critical reasoning than on the memory absorption of knowledge. In the lessons of cognition about society, children analyse films on YouTube and social media entries.
– We want our students to like or share something (...), They thought twice. – Who wrote this? Where was this published? Can I find the same information in another source? – explains the headmistress of 1 of the capital schools. Z The propaganda campaigns supported by the Kremlin Finland have been struggling for 101 years, since the declaration of independency from Russia. However, in 2014 (...) it became apparent that the battlefield had changed: the information war had moved to the Internet. "It is not only a problem of the government, the full society has been attacked. We do our part, it is the task of each of us to defend Finnish democracy," Toivanen says.
