A group of teenagers intently look around the streetscape, then glance at their phones, chat, and resolutely hurry on. It may look like they are collecting some new equivalent of Pokémon – where an online game uses real-life backgrounds – but they are hunting for disinformation. They are doing this in Lithuania (population approximately 2.8 million), which, together with the two other Baltic states (Estonia, population 1.3 million, and Latvia, population 1.8 million), has made an all-of-society approach to disinformation-resilience a priority.

“We try to look for interesting, interactive means, mostly, of course, targeting youth, students and pupils, to offer them innovative and interesting things to grab their attention,” says Tomas Kazulėnas, co-founder of the Civic Resilience Initiative in Lithuania, which organises these games.

His organisation brings local and NATO armed forces, game developers and educators together to make young people familiar with all facets of security – including digital.

Currently, selected schools are testing their newest video game: it features a fake expert, and players must test the expert’s credibility and debunk the false claims when they find them. “We came up with the idea for a game and it’s built on a similar platform to Minecraft,” Kazulėnas says, referencing the best-selling survival video game.

Attracting people to take disinformation seriously is an urgent task in the Baltic states. These small, EU countries have borders with Russia and know first-hand that the latter’s regime will use trade, energy, cyber-warfare and any available tactics to pressure its neighbours into toeing the Kremlin line.

In September, Estonia managed – for the first time – to attribute a cyber-attack to a specific Russian intelligence unit, but groups of hackers are known to respond to political tensions, too. For example, since for many European countries climate action means reducing Russian fossil fuel imports, “Russian state-backed accounts weaponised climate debates, with influence campaigns targeting Western countries and emerging and developing economies respectively,” NATO found in its analysis. According to a survey by the global market research agency Ipsos, over three quarters of people in the Baltic states tend to trust news they hear in conversations with others, and a quarter of Latvians and Lithuanians – far fewer Estonians – trust what they see on TikTok, which is a top online platform among teens globally. Three in five Estonians, it turns out, believe that strengthening media skills is an effective response to falsehoods.

Jolted into action by Russia

Neighbouring Latvia and Estonia are also looking for engaging ways to motivate their societies to train themselves to spot disinformation. The European Digital Media Observatory, an international network of fact-checkers, media literacy experts, and academic researchers, has published a 2024 analysis on how Baltic states apply the inoculation approach to disinformation: teaching people to recognise its telltale signs and production methods, so that they can recognise it when they see it. “Inoculation against disinformation works very much like inoculation against viruses with vaccines,” the report’s authors write. “[You] will need an update quite soon, as the resistance wears off as new strains (or narratives, in this metaphor) appear.”

The Baltic trio ranks high on the widely cited Media Literacy Index, developed by the Open Society Institute in Bulgaria. Estonia shares the fourth and fifth position with Sweden. The Index covers 41 states and claims to measure “the potential vulnerability to disinformation across Europe” – but it relies on a number of indirect indicators, such as education metrics, press freedom and general trust.

When speaking about tackling disinformation, “I pretty much very widely consider it to be combatting information disorders, not just disinformation, but also people’s, for example, absolute certainty that they don’t need any education,” says Maia Klaassen, who calls herself a ‘pracademic’ – a practitioner turned academic.

After a decade spent working on anti-propaganda training, mostly in the non-formal education sector, she is now pursuing a PhD in media literacy at the University of Tartu, Estonia.

Her country’s systematic approach to disinformation resilience is commonly traced to 2007, when a decision to move a statue for Red Army soldiers was met with riots on the streets and a cyber-attack against websites of the Estonian public sector, banks and media. The coordinated campaign was reportedly linked to Russia, but it showed that narratives can bring people to the streets, and different communities’ narratives are distant enough to impede discussion.

This preceded international discussions about filter bubbles. Surveys showed that most of Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority but just over a quarter of Estonian-speakers opposed the removal of the statue. This tied into the debate about who Estonian Russian-speakers, most of whom settled there during the Soviet period, are: legitimately present ‘liberators’ (who followed the Red Army that pushed out the Nazi occupation in 1944) or settler colonialists. To bridge the gaps, the Baltic states started investing into national media in minority languages, so that Russian speakers would have more options than cable TV from Russia when they wanted to find news and entertainment in their mother tongue.

Russia’s actions in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014 created additional urgency, especially relating to the Russian-speaking population. But Klaassen warns that susceptibility to disinformation does not neatly align with linguistic differences. “The general understanding is, if you are born into a family that speaks Russian, you would be a vulnerable audience from birth to death,” she says. “But really, the most vulnerable groups are not [defined] by their social or economic background. What you can define them by is a lack of intellectual humility – this feeling that ‘I definitely know everything. I definitely do not need to fact check. I don’t even need to think twice.’” Social media algorithms, she warns, encourage this.

From the cradle to the grave

Currently, Estonian children develop their digital competences as early as pre-school. The education starts with tactile toys that explain the workings of algorithms, and later moves to how digital content is created.

But even this is too late, Klaassen says. “The problem here is that the parents are very impressed that their small children can handle those devices so well. So they think that the fact that these children are like professionals in swiping and opening games also means that they can analyse what is happening – and that is not at all the case.”

In elementary and middle schools, information literacy is integrated into subjects ranging from social studies to art. In high school, a ‘media and influence’ course is mandatory. This covers bots, trolls and scams.

Kazulėnas says that in Lithuania his team align their educational games with the official school curriculum. “Teachers can easily insert the game into history and civics classes; they can also combine it with IT lessons and teach relevant contemporary topics in a non-traditional way,” he says.

Journalism student Anželika Litvinoviča has trained hundreds of young people to recognise disinformation and spread the knowledge to their communities in her home region of Latgale in Latvia. But as autumn begins, she is preparing for a new challenge – training seniors.

For this, she counts on the support of a local NGO named New East. “We’re thinking that the most effective way is to just bring elderly community leaders together,” she says. In her training sessions, “people would have to come in groups and work on those together [such as] understanding which picture is photoshopped or is an AI image.”

Klaassen in Estonia admits that older people who do not take part in formal schooling are more difficult to reach than curious youth. In this, children may provide an entry point. “Children need to have digital literacies. To parents, we say, ‘You can come too, we’ll talk about it as well, even though you know everything’. And then, usually the way it works is that the children will have a playful approach, and the parents will have a workshop or lecture, accidentally learning something as well. This accidental learning or trickle-down knowledge is actually very common when it comes to the educational side of nudging people towards new behaviours.”

Next step: confronting bias

Many also worry that ethnic and linguistic minorities are also more difficult to reach by state policy than the majority. Ethnic minorities in the Baltics historically had higher unemployment rates and lower earnings, while older Russian speakers were found to be uncomfortable with their minority status after the break-up of the Soviet Union. When entire neighbourhoods are minority-dominated, this further diminishes contact between linguistic communities. Litvinoviča in Latvia’s east has plenty of experience in reaching out to Russian speakers (who make up approximately 35 per cent of the Latvian population): “Since I speak both Russian and Latvian very well, which is a very common thing for a person who comes from [the city of] Daugavpils, it was never really a problem to get together and explain to people in languages that would be most comfortable for them.”

While schools require her to deliver her trainings in the national language, non-formal education provides flexibility. “We also have mixed type of trainings where I speak mostly Latvian, but also if I can see that someone cannot catch everything that I’m saying, I just help them out and speak Russian to them.”

Even as educators find ways to span generational and linguistic divides, there is still a concern that awareness of Russia’s propaganda in relation to the war in Ukraine, for example, may not translate into the same sensitivity to disinformation on other topics. Amid the Paris Olympics, a wave of falsehoods and unverified claims about the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif rippled through the Baltic social network ecosystem. Good societal awareness of disinformation working methods did not help in this case.

“It’s very often about the biases that people have, and sometimes you cannot fight racism or homophobia just through teaching people about verifying information,” Litvinoviča explains.

“Especially for the Baltic states, it’s so important to acknowledge our biases more, and maybe sometimes think, ‘Hey, maybe Russia is also trying to use all this for its own good.’”

Klaassen continues: “We are constantly overwhelmed. We will keep getting more and more overwhelmed. So, what we need to be talking about in these cases are small, practical things that people can do in their daily lives,” she says when asked about responses to these limitations.

Litvinoviča adds: “It’s so important to follow your emotions when it comes to disinformation. If something arouses too many emotions in you, you should be really careful with actually trusting this information.”