Media Literacy Index: education against fake news
Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Sweden and Ireland are at the top-5 in a Media Literacy Index for 2021. These countries have the highest potential to withstand negative impact of fake news and misinformation due to the quality of education, free media and high trust among people, according to The Open Society – Sofia, a non-governmental, public benefit organization founded 1990 by a donation of George Soros.
As in previous years, Finland remains No1 among the 35 European countries included in the index, the organization says.
“The index cluster analysis shows certain geographic patterns as the best performing counties are located in clusters in North-western Europe and the worst performing countries are located in the South-eastern part of the continent. The changes in clusters when the indexes of 2021 and 2019 are compared seems to point to a deterioration in the situation as a number of countries backslide to lower-tier clusters.”
Marin Lessenski, author of the report, said that “the infodemic created a trust crisis, eroding trust as in the medical and scientific knowledge and institutions, which have been the first responders in the health crisis, as well trust crisis of governance, necessary to lead and manage the response to an increasingly all-encompassing crisis – health, social and economic.”
“The countries in the bottom of the ranking are North Macedonia (35th), Bosnia and Herzegovina (34th), Albania (33rd), Montenegro (32nd) and Turkey (31st). These countries have low potential to deal with the effects of fake news and misinformation mainly due to underperformance in media freedom and education.”
The index assesses the resilience potential to fake news in 35 European countries, using indicators for media freedom, education and trust in people. As the indicators have different importance, they are assigned different weight in the model.
The media freedom indicators have the highest weight (Freedom House and Reporters without Borders) along with the education indicators (PISA) with reading literacy having the highest share among them. The e-participation indicator (UN) and trust in people (Eurostat) have smaller weight relative to the other indicators.
“When the scores and ranking of the countries are compared between the 2017 and 2021 editions of the index, the biggest overall improvement is registered by Estonia, Sweden and Ireland, which are good performers anyway, occupying 3rd, 4th and 5th place in the index 2021.”
The report recommends education as the optimal approach to tackling fake news.
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