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How Finland Is Teaching a Generation to Spot Misinformation

NWRatCon said:

How Finland Is Teaching a Generation to Spot Misinformation (NYT, Subscription)​

A typical lesson that Saara Martikka, a teacher in Hameenlinna, Finland, gives her students goes like this: She presents her eighth graders with news articles. Together, they discuss: What’s the purpose of the article? How and when was it written? What are the author’s central claims?
“Just because it’s a good thing or it’s a nice thing doesn’t mean it’s true or it’s valid,” she said. In a class last month, she showed students three TikTok videos, and they discussed the creators’ motivations and the effect that the videos had on them.
Her goal, like that of teachers around Finland, is to help students learn to identify false information.

Finland ranked No. 1 of 41 European countries on resilience against misinformation for the fifth time in a row in a survey published in October by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria. Officials say Finland’s success is not just the result of its strong education system, which is one of the best in the world, but also because of a concerted effort to teach students about fake news. Media literacy is part of the national core curriculum starting in preschool.

If the United States were serious about educational reform, they would pay attention to this. Our societal skill at critical thinking is eroding.

After Finland, the European countries that ranked highest for resilience to misinformation in the Open Society Institute survey were Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland and Sweden. The countries that were the most vulnerable to misinformation were Georgia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Albania. The survey results were calculated based on scores for press freedom, the level of trust in society and scores in reading, science and math.

The United States was not included in the survey, but other polls show that misinformation and disinformation have become more prevalent since 2016 and that Americans’ trust in the news media is near a record low. A survey by Gallup, published in October, found that just 34 percent of Americans trusted the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, slightly higher than the lowest number that the organization recorded, in 2016.
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1st Amendment!

MAGA is cancer.
 
aociswundumho said:
No, that's the part she got wrong. It shouldn't matter to you one bit regarding who wrote what or their motivations. Your goal is to determine if the claims are true and if the argument is sound. Who wrote it or disseminated it is irrelevant regarding truth.
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Sounds like you want to belive what you want to believe.
 
NWRatCon said:
When ignorance is willful, my friend, it is hard to counter. :D If you had followed the links, you would have learned that education tends to bolster resistance to stupidity... I mean, misinformation.
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Exactly, but seeking confirmation bias is willful ignorance.
 
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multivita-man said:
Near record low. At a time when we've never had more theoretical choice in terms of selecting outlets for our information.

Quite the irony, that.
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That’s exactly why the powers that be wished to limit (censor, hide or ban) whatever they chose to define as being ‘misinformation’. A prime example was declaring that the Hunter Biden laptop content was ‘misinformation’.
 
The resistance by some of our posting brethren to the idea of neutral information or critical thinking is instructive itself. It is depressingly convincing evidence of the necessity of education on the topic. I was, personally, amused by the "conformation bias" post earlier. It has, indeed, gone beyond the problem of confirmation bias to a policy of conformation - don't say "gay", don't discomfit whites, don't teach truth, follow the prescribed bias...
 
ttwtt78640 said:
That’s exactly why the powers that be wished to limit (censor, hide or ban) whatever they chose to define as being ‘misinformation’. A prime example was declaring that the Hunter Biden laptop content was ‘misinformation’.
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Completely ignoring the context, of course - the context being that foreign adversaries were known to use misinformation to influence elections. There's no constitutional, fundamental human right to disseminate bullshit as one pleases.
 
multivita-man said:
Completely ignoring the context, of course - the context being that foreign adversaries were known to use misinformation to influence elections. There's no constitutional, fundamental human right to disseminate bullshit as one pleases.
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Nope, the context was that news story could reduce Biden’s election chances so discussing it had to wait until after the election.
 
ttwtt78640 said:
Nope, the context was that news story could reduce Biden’s election chances so discussing it had to wait until after the election.
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How about the fact that there was nothing to it. Still isn't. It was an effort to create a mountain out of a molehill, like the theft of Ashley Biden's diary, these people have no morals and no qualms about promoting lies. Yet, for some reason you cling to their narratives like flotsam in a raging river regardless of where they take you.
 
lemmiwinx said:
One person's misinformation is another person's trusted New York Times article. We're all left to chose on our own.
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And they’re giving kids the tools to do so.

MAGA is still following their feeds where their propagandists want them to go.
 
BirdinHand said:
I remember these type of classes when I was in high school, typically on Friday in Social Studies/History classes.

We would bring in print news articles - and discuss “Current Events”.

I don’t have experience at upper grades to speak of as a parent in 2023 yet, but I do hope this will be something that exists as my son gets older.

It is advantageous to teach children HOW to spot an author/speaker/poster motivation and recognize bias.
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MaggieD, rest her soul, posted a list of ways to tell if a message was manipulative.

The best one went something like this:”If you have an immediate strong emotional response, be suspicious. Emotions trump reason in our minds.
 
ttwtt78640 said:
Nope, the context was that news story could reduce Biden’s election chances so discussing it had to wait until after the election.
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Kinda like that favor trump wanted from Ukraine. Didn’t need to actually investigate the Biden’s. Just announce that Ukraine was investigating.

Doesn’t need to be true or anything. Just scandalous and repeated enough times to become MAGA fact.
 
What if...? said:
And they’re giving kids the tools to do so.

MAGA is still following their feeds where their propagandists want them to go.
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Yep, many choose a steady diet of confirmation bias. BTW, that was the point made in the post to which you replied.
 
What if...? said:
Kinda like that favor trump wanted from Ukraine. Didn’t need to actually investigate the Biden’s. Just announce that Ukraine was investigating.

Doesn’t need to be true or anything. Just scandalous and repeated enough times to become MAGA fact.
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Not similar situations at all - their was no attempt by the government to suppress talking about that ‘perfect‘ phone call on social media.
 
ttwtt78640 said:
Not similar situations at all - their was no attempt by the government to suppress talking about that ‘perfect‘ phone call on social media.
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Seriously? You're going to go that route in this thread? Here's HUGE difference, that a modicum of thought might elucidate: The audio was direct evidence. It was verified, vetted, and produced by a competent news outlet, not a political campaign.

What you are providing, my friend, is an object lesson in exactly what this thread is about - the inability to look critically at sources of information and do a little critical thinking on one's own. It would have been efficacious if you had attended one of those Finnish grade schools to learn these skills.
 
ttwtt78640 said:
Yep, many choose a steady diet of confirmation bias. BTW, that was the point made in the post to which you replied.
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No it wasn't. Good lord. It would be hard to find a more persistent source of misinformation than that poster and they were trying to excuse that behavior by creating a false equivalency. That you fell for that is yet another exemplar of the point of the OP. Thanks for your continuing efforts. It is helping to clarify exactly why this kind of education is so valuable.
 
To recap:
1) this thread is about "How Finland Is Teaching a Generation to Spot Misinformation" (various source materials have been linked)
2) The elements of that are:
a) Finland
b) teaching
c) a Generation
d) spotting misinformation
3) There have been various efforts to deflect, demean, and disinform in this very thread. Proving,
4) The need for education in spotting misinformation by the apparent lack of such education in previous generations. (The missing element, for careful observers, is: we're not in Finland.)
 
NWRatCon said:
Seriously? You're going to go that route in this thread? Here's HUGE difference, that a modicum of thought might elucidate: The audio was direct evidence. It was verified, vetted, and produced by a competent news outlet, not a political campaign.

What you are providing, my friend, is an object lesson in exactly what this thread is about - the inability to look critically at sources of information and do a little critical thinking on one's own. It would have been efficacious if you had attended one of those Finnish grade schools to learn these skills.
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Hmm… what was the source of the Steele dossier?
 
ttwtt78640 said:
Hmm… what was the source of the Steele dossier?
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A former MI6 analyst.

Did you not know that? It's in the name.

Maybe you haven't looked at the information in a dispassionate, critical way, but that might be a good example of how disinformation is spread. The dossier, leaked by BuzzFeed News in January 2017,[13] without its author's permission,[14][15][16][17][18] is an unfinished 35-page compilation of raw intelligence[19][20] (Wikipedia, with links) The dossier became a political football and the subject, itself, of disinformation campaigns that are still ongoing.

While the dossier played a central role in the seeking of FISA warrants on Carter Page,[38][39][40] it did not play any role in the intelligence community's assessment about Russian actions in the 2016 election,[41][42][43][44] and it was not the trigger for the opening of the Russia investigation into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with the Russian government's interference in the 2016 presidential election.[38][45][46] The dossier is a factor in several conspiracy theories promoted by Trump[47] and his supporters in the media[48] and Congress.[38][45][46]

A full background on the dossier can be found here: Gubarev v. Orbis Judgment
 
lemmiwinx said:
One person's misinformation is another person's trusted New York Times article. We're all left to chose on our own.
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The existence of objective reality is no longer a thing with modern "conservatism", I take it.

This is the second post I have seen today from Trump supporters denying that there is no objective way to tell what's true and what's not.
 
Simon W. Moon said:
The existence of objective reality is no longer a thing with modern "conservatism", I take it.

This is the second post I have seen today from Trump supporters denying that there is no objective way to tell what's true and what's not.
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True. And so dangerous.
 
NWRatCon said:
A former MI6 analyst.

Did you not know that? It's in the name.

Maybe you haven't looked at the information in a dispassionate, critical way, but that might be a good example of how disinformation is spread. The dossier, leaked by BuzzFeed News in January 2017,[13] without its author's permission,[14][15][16][17][18] is an unfinished 35-page compilation of raw intelligence[19][20] (Wikipedia, with links) The dossier became a political football and the subject, itself, of disinformation campaigns that are still ongoing.

While the dossier played a central role in the seeking of FISA warrants on Carter Page,[38][39][40] it did not play any role in the intelligence community's assessment about Russian actions in the 2016 election,[41][42][43][44] and it was not the trigger for the opening of the Russia investigation into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with the Russian government's interference in the 2016 presidential election.[38][45][46] The dossier is a factor in several conspiracy theories promoted by Trump[47] and his supporters in the media[48] and Congress.[38][45][46]

A full background on the dossier can be found here: Gubarev v. Orbis Judgment
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The Clinton campaign funded it.

www.cnn.com

FEC fines Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC over Trump-Russia dossier research | CNN Politics

Federal election regulators fined Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee earlier this month for not properly disclosing the money they spent on controversial opposition research that led to the infamous Trump-Russia dossier.
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com
 
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