#disinformation

Include the link to the source or it didn't happen!!!

And preferably include the source (website) name and date/year in the post too!!!

This has been a very loud, but very humble beseechment from your local media professional, thank you for your time

Seriously though, the spread of misinformation and disinformation is higher than ever, thanks to AI, botnets, 4chan, fascists, psyops, etc. Please use good sourcing!!! This is legit a way to help keep your communities safe.

If you see something and you don't know if it's true, or if the source is reliable, the two best/most comprehensive places to check are:

Snopes - to check if something is true/real, including social media posts and images/videos

Media Bias/Fact Check - to check if a website, news outlet, or other source is reliable. They rate outlets on accuracy of reporting and on political bias, and maintain detailed fact-checking records

I encourage you to check them whenever you're not sure about something important - the bigger and more upsetting it is, the more important it is to check! And I also encourage you to bookmark them for whenever are worried you might be reblogging something untrue or made by AI!

By  JAMES BROOKSUpdated 5:17 AM AEDT, January 6, 2026

HELSINKI (AP) — The battle against fake news in Finland starts in preschool classrooms.

For decades, the Nordic nation has woven media literacy, including the ability to analyse different kinds of media and recognise disinformation, into its national curriculum for students as young as 3 years old. The coursework is part of a robust anti-misinformation program to make Finns more resistant to propaganda and false claims, especially those crossing over the 1,340-kilometre (830-mile) border with neighbouring Russia.

Now, teachers are tasked with adding artificial intelligence literacy to their curriculum, especially after Russia stepped up its disinformation campaign across Europe following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago. Finland’s ascension into NATO in 2023 also provoked Moscow’s ire, though Russia has repeatedly denied it interferes in the internal affairs of other countries.

“We think that having good media literacy skills is a very big civic skill,” Kiia Hakkala, a pedagogical specialist for the City of Helsinki, told The Associated Press. “It’s very important to the nation’s safety and to the safety of our democracy.”

AI literacy becoming a vital skill

At Tapanila Primary School, in a quiet neighbourhood north of Helsinki, teacher Ville Vanhanen taught a group of fourth graders how to spot fake news. As a TV screen beamed a “Fact or Fiction?” banner, student Ilo Lindgren evaluated the prompt.

“It is a little bit hard,” the 10-year-old admitted.

Vanhanen said his students have been learning about fake news and disinformation for years, beginning with reading headlines and short texts. In a recent class, the fourth graders were tasked with coming up with five things to look out for when consuming online news to ensure it’s trustworthy. Now they are moving onto AI literacy, which is quickly becoming a vital skill.

“We’ve been studying how to recognise if a picture or a video is made by AI,” added Vanhanen, a teacher and vice principal at the school.

Finnish media also play a role, organising an annual “Newspaper Week,” where papers and other news are sent to young people to consume. In 2024, Helsinki-based Helsingin Sanomat collaborated on a new “ABC Book of Media Literacy,” distributed to every 15-year-old in the country as they began upper secondary school.

“It’s really important for us to be seen as a place where you can get information that’s been verified, that you can trust, and that’s done by people you know in a transparent way,” Jussi Pullinen, the daily newspaper’s managing editor, said.

Democracy is challenged through disinformation

Media literacy has been part of the Finnish educational curriculum since the 1990s, and additional courses are available for older adults who might be especially vulnerable to misinformation.

The skills are so ingrained into the culture that the Nordic nation of 5.6 million people regularly ranks at the top of the European Media Literacy Index. The index was compiled by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria, between 2017 and 2023.

“I don’t think we envisioned that the world would look like this,” Finnish Education Minister Anders Adlercreutz said. “That we would be bombarded with disinformation, that our institutions are challenged — our democracy really challenged — through disinformation.”

And with the rapid advancement of AI tools, educators and experts are rushing to teach students and the rest of the public how to tell what’s fact and what’s fake news.

“It already is much harder in the information space to spot what’s real and what’s not real,” Martha Turnbull, director of hybrid influence at the Helsinki-based European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, said. “It just so happens that right now, it’s reasonably easy to spot the AI-generated fakes because the quality of them isn’t as good as it could be.”

Resources From The Leftist Feminist Philosopher

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Keep a list of sites you never heard of!

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

My posts

Resources for learning the history, tropes, and behaviors of conspiracy theories

How to persuade people more effectively

How to help someone get out of a harmful group (like a cult or conspiracist community)

More advice for getting people out of conspiratorial, pseudoscientific, and generally bogus belief systems

You must help people build resistance to fear-based thinking

How To Debunk Complex Beliefs (Like A Conspiratorial Worldview)

Other posts & resources

On changing people's minds

On getting people out of conspiratorial worldviews

On the importance of positive reinforcement

The key to fighting pseudoscience isn’t mockery—it’s empathy

How to talk to someone about conspiracy theories in five simple steps

People Who Feel Excluded Are Susceptible to Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy Theories Can Be Undermined with These Strategies, New Analysis Shows

A New Study Has Found a Way to Stop People From Believing in Conspiracy Theories

The Debunking Handbook

How to Stop a Conspiracy Theory Before It Starts

Six Ways to Debunk Any Conspiracy Theory

Snopes

FactCheck.org

PolitiFact

Evaluating Sources

Misinformation, Disinformation & Malinformation: A Guide

A quick guide to spotting misinformation

Fake News & Misinformation: How to Spot and Verify

Sure ways to spot a scammer

"No one stands outside the online–offline continuum. Journalists, academics, policymakers, activists and everyday users all navigate the same attention-driven systems. Information disorder campaigns succeed not because people are irrational or malicious, but because they exploit ordinary human responses in environments built for speed, emotion and visibility.

Recognising this shared vulnerability is not a weakness; it is the foundation of democratic resilience. As intelligence agencies have made clear, the struggle over information is now part of how wars are fought.

Instead of providing me with alternative sources or acknowledging they were wrong they replied with: “I think it's very clear what the facts are and I would not like to get into an argument about it.”

I provided them with sources, I wasn’t mean or condescending, I just wanted to correct them about a post they made that has a high chance of being false.