Focus on the player, not the puck: Finnish approaches to combatting electoral interference

(Ongoing coverage of Attention: Freedom, Interrupted at McGill University in Montreal. Liveblog – I will get things wrong – feel free to correct me if I have misrepresented you.)

How does a nation become resilient to foreign election interference?

Atte Jääskeläinen, director of Finnish foundation Sitra, argues that it’s part of Finland’s national character. Finland gets a lot of credit for educating students to be critical consumers of media. But he notes that it’s a longer story “starting in the 19th century when Finland had ideas of being independent. It’s always been about Russia”. Even though Finland had a defense agreement with the Soviet Union, “everyone knew why Finland had a large army… it wasn’t for war with Sweden.”

The story of the nation creates the ground for being resilient to international interference. Jääskeläinen worked with Jessikka Aro, a Finnish reporter who was active in exposing the Russian troll factory in St Petersburg in her book, Putin’s Trolls. The pressure she received from Russian actors was so severe that she eventually had to leave Finland for Switzerland. But she was ultimately able to document a pattern of disinformation that’s been influential around the world, not just across Finland’s 1300km border with Russia.

For Robert Fife, Ottawa bureau chief for the Globe and Mail, disinformation operations have forced reporters to look around the world and deeply into local communities. Disinfo often targets Chinese speakers, Punjabi speakers and other groups who often aren’t reading the Globe and Mail, but WeChat, Indian-language media and other sources of information that routinely distribute state sponsored disinformation. The most powerful weapon to counter disinformation is transparency, Fife argues, but to be transparent and effective, Canadian reporters have to better represent what Canada looks like – it speaks not just English and French, but Chinese and Punjabi as well.

Mark Scott of the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council suggests that we may overfocus on subrosa actions by state disinformation providers. His research on whether AfD received undue amplification by X during the recent elections suggested that the algorithm did not overweight AfD leaders (other research finds other conclusions) but that it did give Musk enormous reach. That isn’t clandestine election influence – it’s the classic example of a media owner putting his finger on the scale. Phenomena like the Trucker Convoy, a 2022 protest movement in Canada over vaccine mandates for cross-border drivers, leveraged social media groups that emerged organically out of lockdown protests over two years – they were not created by troll factories, but they were real, but invisible to journalists, Scott argues.

Jääskeläinen reminds the audience that the Nazi regime not only figured out how to ensure that Hitler’s speeches were always reproduced on radio, but circulated inexpensive radios – one third the cost of normal radios – that could only receive Nazi stations. Authoritarians have always been anxious to control the media, and open societies have worked to ensure the tremendous power of broadcast media is responsibly wielded. It’s clear that this responsibility hasn’t translated into online spaces.

Scott suggests that foreign interference is not taken seriously by media, which overfocuses on shiny things like bot farms and troll factories, but doesn’t pay attention to the networks that develop between AM radio, traditional media, domestic and international extremism in the years between elections. Foreign interference is one part of an immense and complex ecosystem, and it’s challenging to understand and to report.

Jääskeläinen offers a hockey metaphor for understanding misinformation: the puck doesn’t score – it’s the player. So focus on the player, not the puck. We see huge volumes of disinformation, but often it’s being shared by a small set of actors, and understanding them and their motivations may be the effective way of understanding what unfolds in a complex ecosystem.

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