Filtering for the truth
On radio towers, disinformation campaigns, and the need to adopt best practices in media literacy from places like Finland
Finland's approach to educating young people about media literacy is something that can (and promptly should) be implemented in the United States, at the state level. State legislatures and education departments should not delay. And if they do, school districts should act.
■ Finland got ahead of much of the rest of the world because it's within the physical reach of Russian broadcasting antennas. A 100,000-watt FM radio station on a 2,000' tower can easily reach a radius of 100 miles, and there are portions of Finland within 100 miles of St. Petersburg (merely as one example).
■ Helsinki is just 50 miles as the crow flies from Tallinn, Estonia (which was long held under occupation by the USSR). In the United States, these places could easily fit within the same television or radio media market.
■ Circumstances on the ground forced Finland to adapt. And the Russian disinformation environment is mostly a continuation of Soviet disinformation. But now that we have the Internet, physicals limitation have been compressed -- everyone with a smartphone is within arm's reach of foreign propaganda.
■ Under those conditions, the the most important defense is to build up a public that knows how to resist mis- and dis-information. Reality is the best friend of liberty: Free people can face hard truths and good news alike, but trust in truthful representation is essential. That's why outlets like the BBC and the Voice of America treasure their reputations for journalistic independence.
■ It's the bad actors, like authoritarians, totalitarians, and fascists, who need lies to prop themselves up. Those regimes need the spectrum of bad information so much that they are incentivized to be both well-practiced and sophisticated at persuasion through untruth.
