Iceland has mostly avoided misinformation. That may be changing.
REYKJAVIK, Iceland — For centuries, Iceland has tended to be off the world’s beaten path. It’s an island in the North Atlantic, home today to about 400,000 people. Its language, Icelandic, is spoken in large numbers nowhere else.
These factors — combined with affluence (a GDP per capita similar to the United States) and high education (a college-degree attainment rate that exceeds Canada’s and Germany’s) — have tended to protect Icelanders from the tide of misinformation that has flooded other countries, including the U.S.
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors