Yle's new verification team is dedicated to checking and confirming information.
While verification has always been part of journalism's core, the new team intends to strengthen that capability.
"As disinformation and deepfakes proliferate, the team's job is to ensure that people in Finland continue to receive reliable information," said Krista Taubert, editor-in-chief of Yle's in-depth journalism, news and sports unit.
Here are some recent practical examples of the team's work.
AI-generated Christmas market image
A Christmas-market image circulating on social media turned out to have been generated by artificial intelligence, as revealed by a reverse image search.
Reporter Satu Helin investigated the veracity of online claims about security at German Christmas markets. Many of the assertions proved to be false. The photograph accompanying these claims was, in fact, AI-generated.
To trace the source of images and videos, she used Google Earth to verify where the videos had originally been filmed.
Helin pointed out that disinformation campaigns are designed to corrode public trust in Finnish society, encouraging people to doubt everything, including official statements and academic research.
Deepfake videos and images stripped from their original context are often intended to provoke anger and suspicion. Social media platforms, Helin noted, currently reward material that elicits strong emotions.
Code sifts data
Journalist Henrik Wacker, meanwhile, wrote a programme for identifying the lobbyists behind significant reforms to Finland's gambling laws. The bill emerged as one of the most heavily lobbied legislative projects in recent years.
Parliament approved the reform this week.
He said he was struck by the extent of lobbying by Finnish media organisations, including the Finnish Media Federation and commercial broadcaster MTV. Foreign gambling companies and the state monopoly, Veikkaus, were also active on this front.
Lobbying is a difficult subject to scrutinise, according to Wacker, since much of it takes place behind closed doors.
The authorities publish large quantities of raw data, which Wacker sifted through while reporting the story.
"For this piece, I wrote a simple programme that allowed me to extract the information most relevant to the gambling law reform," he explained.
The problem today, according to Wacker, is not a lack of data, but the difficulty of identifying what truly matters within it.
