Finnish news media experienced an exceptional period of hybrid information warfare in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation. Fake social media accounts had been spreading misinformation supporting Vladimir Putin’s government and the state of Russia already for a while. Following that, in 2014, right-wing activist Ilja Janitskin established a new platform, MV-lehti, an online newspaper that published hate speech and propaganda in Finnish, which gained some popularity among people supporting Russia, as well as among right-wing extremists. In 2018, Ilja Janitskin was finally arrested and sentenced to jail on 16 different criminal counts, including harassment and aggravated defamation of Yle journalist Jessika Aro (Nousiainen, 2019).
At the same time in 2014, a small group of Finnish journalists and a Finnish transparency NGO called Avoin yhteiskunta [Open society] created the Faktabaari [FactBar] fact-checking service to meet the increasing need of preventing distribution of misinformation. Faktabaari started by checking claims made in the European election debate and ran a fact-checking campaign during the general elections in 2015. However, among the leading Finnish news media organisations, only HS identified itas an important partner for collaboration and as an instrument for producing high-quality journalism.
Since 2015, public service media Ylehas been offering a special series of online stories in Finnish, aimed at revealing different cases of misinformation under a common title Valheenpaljastaja [Lie detector] (Yle, n.d.). In addition, Yle has also invested in new ways of increasing audience awareness and understanding of troll tactics by developing an online game that lets you play the role of a hateful troll. Trollitehdas [Troll factory]was first released in Finnish in May 2019, and it turned out to be so popular that an international version in English was released only a few months later (Yle, n.d.).
Practically all other editors-in-chief and journalists interviewed for this study stressed the importance of internal processes, guidelines, and rules as well as traditional practices and conventions of good journalism in fact-checking. As mentioned earlier, CMM has a central role in creating, maintaining, and controlling the obedience of the ethical rules for producing good journalism as a self-regulatory organisation of the media. A media outlet in Finland not committed to the ethical rules of CMM is still a rare exception, but in 2018, the members of the council started to use a special emblem of membership as a sign of “responsible journalism”.
