Fact-checkers and the news media: A Nordic perspective on propaganda

In this article, I examine how Nordic fact-checkers work with other closely related stakeholder organisations to counter disinformation in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The fact-checker organisations studied are: Norwegian Faktisk.no (founded in 2017), Danish TjekDet (founded in 2016), Swedish Källkritikbyrån (founded in 2014 as Viralgranskaren), and Finnish Faktabaari (founded in 2014).

Three concepts with similar meanings can be found under the umbrella term Information Disorder – or the effect of how online platforms affect the supply of information: disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. According to Wardle and Derakhshan (2017), disinformation is spread with the intent of harming others; misinformation is the unintentional sharing of false information; and malinformation is true information, but with a harmful intent (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017; SitraFund, 2022).

In the study, I conducted 17 in-depth, semi-structured expert interviews with Nordic professionals working with fact-checking and related activities. The main part of the study focuses on the four largest Nordic fact-checking organisations, comparing their work to those of legacy media, which are represented by well-informed executives of the four Nordic journalist unions. Because the four fact-checking organisations are also actively engaged in media and information literacy (MIL) work, four national MIL-expert interviewees were chosen to provide complementary insights into prevalent challenges within this closely related subject area. Finally, interviews with representatives from policymaking institutions with different areas of expertise were added to provide a broader perspective on disinformation issues in the Nordic region.

Sharing a common democratic corporatist tradition (Hallin & Mancini, 2004), Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden are often characterised as media welfare states (Enli & Syvertsen, 2020; Syvertsen et al., 2014). Another commonality among the Nordics is that they have been particularly resilient to disinformation. Humprecht and colleagues (2020, 2021) have demonstrated that the Nordics are consensual, media-supportive, and resilient societies due to low levels of polarisation and populist communication, high levels of trust, and strong public service media. However, in their follow-up study, resilience-promoting factors were identified as being country specific, where “the political, media, and economic environments play a major role in how citizens react to disinformation, and policy solutions to tackle the problem must be tailored to the particular social environment” (Humprecht et al., 2021: 2). This necessitates a more in-depth qualitative examination into how these country-specific environments appear in the Nordic countries, as well as what specific challenges and solutions emerge in the Nordic approach to countering disinformation and promoting resilience.

The aim of the study is to explore the above differences and challenges as seen from the perspective of the four Nordic fact-checker organisations. These organisations are all less than ten years old. They are all dedicated to combatting disinformation, but there have been few studies on how this is accomplished and how their work relates to that of other epistemic institutions such as media literacy organisations, legacy media, and associated national policymaker institutions.

The study’s objective is to comprehend the relations between these organisations with respect to fact-checkers, recognising parallels in their work and discerning the challenges and solutions that are specific to the Nordic social environments. The main research question is: How do fact-checkers, policymakers, and journalist trade unions view the role of fact-checking journalism in countering disinformation in the Nordic countries?

Reviewing and analysing key themes from the interviews, I focus on the roles of the fact-checkers and their relationship with the other stakeholders. Furthermore, I aim to deduce how the fact-checking work can be considered as contributing to the attested Nordic resilience to disinformation. The empirical material, the method, and the rationale for selecting the respondents are presented next.

To gather comparable cross-national empirical data, in-depth, semi-structured expert interviews were conducted with prominent executives in comparable roles in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The material for this study comprises 18 interviews conducted over Zoom that were 45–60 minutes long each. I conducted most of the interviews in the respondent’s native language, then translated the transcripts into English and coded and thematically analysed them according to the overarching themes. An exception is the interview with the Finnish MEP, which was conducted by colleagues in the CORDI project (www.cordi.blog). To clarify some points, an additional interview with an experienced freelance journalist, who is well-published in several Nordic media outlets, was added.

A single interview guide was used for all interviews, focusing on topics related to disinformation and fact-checking. Three broad questions were posed to all interviewees: what their key challenges are; what viable solutions to these difficulties already exist; and how researchers can help. To round out the data-gathering process, an extra group interview was held with all the fact-checkers present, to clarify concerns not included in the initial interview material.

The thematic analysis started with an initial list of codes that were created inductively based on the topics that emerged during the reading of the transcripts (Miles & Huberman, 1994). These codes related to the interviewees’ social, technological, epistemological, economic, and political challenges. The initial codes were then combined and rearranged in the secondary-cycle coding, forming themes conceptually related to the available literature on the subject (Saldaña, 2009). These themes align reasonably well with the resilience-promoting factors used by Humprecht and colleagues (2021: 2): “the political, media, and economic environments”, or the dimensions, as they are called in their study.

The four groups of interviewees represented different stratums of society. They include fact-checkers, media information literacy specialists, the established news media, and policymakers. With the fact-checkers being the main research-subject, their interviews were conducted first, to learn more about how the Nordic fact-checkers operate and how their responsibilities compare to those of journalists at conventional media outlets.

The journalists and news media were represented by the Nordic journalist unions, as their executives have a deep understanding of the journalistic work conducted across the field, both commercial and public service media.

MIL institutions were incorporated because they could provide information and viewpoints on disinformation in relation to various age groups and demographics. Also, since the fact-checkers are also involved in MIL work, I wanted to study how much the organisations’ activities and areas of collaboration overlap.

Finally, interviewees at ministry and EU levels provided deeper insights into policymaking, since they have a regulatory and legislative role that influences the funding and policy of all the organisations involved.

The material’s shortcomings are mostly in this last segment, primarily due to the policymaking and ministry-level sectors in the Nordics being disparate, which made it difficult to find comparable respondents. The original plan to interview Stratcom responders from all four countries became undoable, due to the secrecy of the organisations engaged in psychological warfare. The single Stratcom interview was therefore included as part of the policymaker segment. The Nordic Council of Ministers was included since they were expected to present a broad understanding of the challenges from a MIL perspective; however, it would have been more fruitful to approach the four ministers of culture directly.

Ideally, newsroom journalists and editors-in-chief of both commercial and public service media organisations would also have been included. A follow-up study covering Nordic public service media institutions is forthcoming to address some of these shortcomings. All interviews were preceded with a written agreement of consent, and the interviewees have been anonymised. Table 1 lays out the details of the interviewees, including the alpha codes used to identify them for quotes cited in this article:

In the Nordic welfare states – or the Nordic media welfare states (Syvertsen et al., 2014) – the press and public service news media have traditionally been critical in supporting the resilience to disinformation. However, the media logic is changing (Asp, 2014). The market for professional news shows considerable variations in the business models across the Nordics. Media policies for supporting commercial news media are radically different, which means that “the Nordic region is not as homogeneous a region in the media field as one can sometimes be led to believe” (Ohlsson et al., 2021).

Nonetheless, the four Nordic countries studied are doing well according to several important indicators. They are in the top five, together with Estonia, in the Reporters Without Borders (2022) Freedom of the Press Index. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 (Newman et al., 2021), the Nordics are also among the top five in terms of general trust in news. Moreover, the confidence in the national governments is high, with all four countries in the top eight of OECD indicators (OECD Data, 2023).

Since 2014 and the annexation of Crimea, Russian propagandists have been ramping up their narratives, using different types of computational propaganda (Dawson & Innes, 2019; van Herpen, 2016; Volchek & Sindelar, 2015) and massive bursts of multichannel disinformation feeds, creating firehoses of falsehood (Paul & Matthews, 2016) using artificial intelligence–based bots and trolls and paid-for coordinated political human influencers (Woolley, 2022). These forms of computational propaganda aim to trick people into ignoring their cognitive abilities (Bradshaw et al., 2020; Gorwa, 2019; Woolley & Howard, 2018), providing fertile ground for the spreading of propaganda, not just vertically but horizontally, as presented in the Ellul (1973) taxonomy, as misinformation spreads among the citizens themselves. As I show, these phenomena are also common in the Nordics.

With the dominance of Facebook as a platform for sharing news, citizens become more isolated due to algorithmic filter bubbles and echo chambers (Beam et al., 2018; York et al., 2020), and we risk “our capacity to govern ourselves as reasonable democracies” (Benkler et al., 2018: 4). As explained by Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen, Facebook’s new recommendation algorithm has had radical consequences for the epistemologies of digital journalism and the development of misinformation and disinformation online (Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport and Media, 2022).

Disinformation, polarisation, and audience fragmentation (McNair, 2018) have been increasing rapidly alongside the platformisation of society and journalism (Poell et al., 2019). As financial resources continue to decline, “adherence to the core journalistic tasks of source verification and fact-based reporting become increasingly difficult” (Mayerhöffer et al., 2022: 37). Furthermore, a decline in media pluralism (Karppinen, 2013) and concentration of ownership is contributing to a general distrust of news media, increasing vulnerability to disinformation (Leith, 2022). As the dissemination of news moves from traditional news media to online (alternative and social media) platforms (Ekström & Westlund, 2019), independent fact-checkers are particularly needed.

Professional fact-checking is not restricted to the traditional news organisations (Graves, 2018; Graves & Anderson, 2020); independent fact-checking organisations conduct a large portion of the fact-checking of online social media.

The global media logic (Altheide, 2004) has changed dramatically since the fact-checker phenomenon began in the early 2000s and developed during the 2004 American elections. With a surge of propaganda and in the ongoing war in Ukraine, the work of international fact-checkers has assumed unprecedented global importance (York et al., 2020). Consequently, the independent fact-checking organisations have found a natural niche, as “the practises and the discourse of these new journalistic actors offer an exceptionally clear view of systemic changes in the news media”, as argued by Graves (2012: 291). Correspondingly, the EU Commission has updated the code of conduct to emphasise the importance of fact-checkers in combating disinformation (European Commission, 2021b).

The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) (www.poynter.org/ifcn/) works as a certification agency that gathers international fact-checking organisations from around the world. A commitment to the IFCN code of principles is required to be accepted as verified signatories (IFCN, 2023; European Commission, 2022). A newcomer in the global fact-checker consortium scene is the European Fact-Checking Standards Network, (EFCSN) (www.eufactcheckingproject.com). It is an answer to the EU’s call, “Integrity of social media” (European Commission, 2021a), and it is thus an EU-supported effort. The 44 European founding members raise the standards of best practices pertaining to issues of fact-checker independence, transparency, and methodological and journalistic quality. The Nordic fact-checkers adhere to these principles in their work, and all except the Finnish fact-checkers are members of both the IFCN and the EFCSN. There was general agreement of what fact-checking is among the interviewees, and they laid out the following basic premises of fact-checking: it is a subgenre of investigative journalism; it has publishing in mind (i.e., writing stories); it checks claims, not opinions; it uses classic news criteria for selecting claims with local relevance; it finds the balance of virality and importance; and in addition to just checking claims, it also provides context about the check.

The Nordic fact-checkers have similar working methods: monitoring the media, spotting claims, checking claims, and lastly publishing and spreading the checked claims online. The size of the organisations varies greatly: Norwegian Faktisk.no has thirteen full-time staff and Danish Tjekdet.dk has nine full-time staff, all working in a traditional newsroom setting. Finnish Faktabaari has three–five staff members, and Swedish Källkritikbyrån has three. Tjekdet.dk, Faktisk.no, and Källkritikbyrån are official third-party fact-checkers for Facebook, who provides them with a special feed of potential check-worthy claims and pays for fact-checked and labelled articles.

Though the essence of what the fact-checkers do is investigating and verifying claims, teaching and promoting MIL is also an important aspect of their work. All four organisations, with considerable knowledge of digital information literacy, contribute to and actively collaborate with the national Nordic MIL organisations (Media Council, 2021; National Audiovisual Institute, 2021; Norwegian Media Authority, 2022; Swedish Media Council, 2022).

The findings are presented as follows: The media environment is described with quotes and comments from the material that relate to the roles and importance of the fact-checkers. These findings are then followed by the challenges they face in relation to issues of socio-political consciousness. Then the journalists’ views of the fact-checkers are presented. The political environment is related to emergent issues on propaganda and trust in media and society. The economic environment relates to how the fact-checkers are funded and what they say about their relationship with their owners. This is combined with a presentation of the criticism directed at fact-checkers while discussing problems such as media plurality and independence from Facebook. Lastly, a short summary of key MIL and policymaker comments is presented. In this way, the results are coupled with the media, economic, and political environments used as analytical dimensions by Humprecht and colleagues (2020), albeit with modified subdivisions.

This study shows that there are both differences and similarities between the Nordic countries in terms of the factors promoting resilience to disinformation. In reviewing the findings of how the Nordic fact-checkers and related stakeholder organisations discuss their roles and contributions in countering disinformation, we use three dimensions as defined by Humprecht and colleagues (2020) in their framework: the media environment, the political environment, and the economic environment.

To conclude, I agree with Humprecht and colleagues (2020, 2021), that policy solutions to tackle the resilience problem must be tailored to the particular social environments, also in the Nordics. However, there is no quick and easy policy solution to tackle these problems. Therefore, I argue that there is a need to revitalise the Nordic media welfare state overall; harmonise the media support policies to ensure a healthy media landscape and public service media where the journalistic ethos can prevail; regulate the social media platform recommendation algorithms; and recognise the importance of the work of independent fact-checkers and the EFCN and IFCN. Finally, long-term support for critical MIL education is vital, to help citizens form factual considered opinions.

According to the findings, all respondents consider fact-checking journalism an important counterpart to the traditional news media. With the rapid advancement of generative AI, discerning artificially generated text, images, voice, and video from factual content is becoming increasingly challenging. Hence, the specialised forensic skills and services provided by the fact-checkers are essential in debunking disinformation and defusing propaganda in all democracies, not just the Nordic ones.