Not exactly “Hot Off the Wire” but a good reminder to follow the journalist Eliza Mackintosh and the great counter-disinformation work happening in Finland.
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It may be difficult to export democracy, but it is easy to import experts, which is precisely what Finland did in 2016 to combat what it saw as a rise in disinformation emanating from accounts linked to its neighbor to the east.
“They knew that the Kremlin was messing with Finnish politics, but they didn’t have a context with which to interpret that. They were wondering if this meant they [Russia] would invade, was this war?” Jed Willard, director of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Center for Global Engagement at Harvard University, who was hired by Finland to train state officials to spot and then hit back at fake news, told CNN.
Russia maintains that it has not and does not interfere in the domestic politics of other countries.
Behind closed doors, Willard’s workshops largely focused on one thing: developing a strong national narrative, rather than trying to debunk false claims.
“The Finns have a very unique and special strength in that they know who they are. And who they are is directly rooted in human rights and the rule of law, in a lot of things that Russia, right now, is not,” Willard said. “There is a strong sense of what it means to be Finnish … that is a super power.”
Not all nations have the type of narrative to fall back on that Finland does….
Read the whole piece at https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-fake-news-intl/