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.
“Due to its size and little population, Iceland might lack the critical mass needed for a good conspiracy and misinformation campaign,” said Markus Hermann Meckl, a social science professor at the University of Akureyri in northern Iceland. “I have lived in a few countries, and Iceland is probably the country I encountered the least nonsense.”
However, experts here say that Iceland’s distance from the rest of the world no longer guarantees the degree of protection from misinformation that it once did.
“Our isolation has helped us, but the walls are breaking down,” said Valgerður Anna Jóhannsdóttir, a former journalist who now heads the journalism program at the University of Iceland. “We’re a high-tech country, so everyone is internet-connected and uses social media. It leaves you a bit open.”
Valgerður Anna Jóhannsdóttir, head of the University of Iceland journalism program, at the university in Reykjavik. (Louis Jacobson / Poynter)
“I am in some social media groups where wrong information is circulating, and it’s not good for my mental health,” said Hulda Þórisdóttir, a University of Iceland political scientist who has studied conspiracy theories, including those about COVID-19 and related topics.
While Icelanders’ first and most-used language is Icelandic, fluency in English is almost universal, enabling misinformation from English-language social media to penetrate the nation’s discussion.
“Icelanders are susceptible to everything floating around elsewhere,” said Eiríkur Bergmann, a political scientist at Bifröst University in Iceland. “About 40% of Icelanders claim in polls to believe in the ‘deep state.’ But there has never been any domestic discussion about the deep state, so it’s a concept that’s been imported from discourse from abroad.”
“There’s a strong social fabric here, and relatively strong cohesion in Icelandic politics,” Bergmann added. “But you see the same disintegration in trust as elsewhere, and the same sort of upheaval in political discourse.”
A study released this summer by Iceland’s Media Commission found Icelanders reported seeing more misinformation than the last time the survey was undertaken, in 2022.
In this year’s survey, 71% of respondents said they had become aware of “fake news” online during the previous 12 months, or more than 12% higher than the share who said so in 2022. About a quarter acknowledged having formed an inaccurate opinion about a politician or a celebrity due to misleading information, which also represented an increase over the 2022 level.
In both surveys, the Media Commission asked about a specific — and unsupported — claim, that “Nordic and Christian values are being undermined by deliberately directing a stream of refugees from the Middle East here.” Almost 40% of respondents either partially or strongly agreed with that statement. That was up from about 23% who said they agreed in 2022.
Such concerns about migrants are “not necessarily lived experience in this country, but rather the effect of imported rhetoric from elsewhere,” Bergmann said.
Jóhannsdóttir recalled her 20-year-old son telling her recently about one of his peers “ranting on TikTok that women and men are different, with men better suited to governing.”
“I was like, ‘Where do these ideas come from?’” Jóhannsdóttir said, noting that Iceland’s prime minister is a woman, and that more than half the government’s cabinet is too. “I have no doubt that these come from social media and podcasts that are not Icelandic.”
At the same time, observers of the media and social media here today said they are comforted by Icelanders’ response to online misinformation.
A 2023 survey of Icelanders, conducted by Silja Bára R. Ómarsdóttir for the University of Iceland’s Institute of International Affairs, found that “fake news and information disorder” ranked fifth on a list of 10 “greatest challenges” facing the country, behind economic matters, climate change and immigration but ahead of crime, war, terrorism and unemployment.
Survey respondents, Ómarsdóttir said, saw it as “a significant security threat.”
Silja Bára R. Ómarsdóttir, rector of the University of Iceland and a professor in international affairs, in Reykjavik. (Louis Jacobson / Poynter)
The Media Commission survey also reported increased effort by Icelanders to question the information they see online. About 46% said they checked trusted sources when confronted with something they weren’t sure was accurate; 31% double-checked the information on a search engine; and almost 27% checked other news stories published on the website. Almost 12% looked into the IP address of dubious content and almost 8% called up a fact-checking site.
The percent of respondents who said they did nothing declined from 43% to 26%.
Hrafnhildur Fönn Ingjaldsdóttir, who wrote an academic thesis about misinformation as a student at the University of Akureyri in Iceland, said such habits should be reinforced. “We need to teach people how to distinguish good sources from bad sources,” she said.
Some of that work is being done already: Experts here praised government-backed outreach efforts by the Media Commission to boost media literacy skills in schools. The commission has been “tireless about warning about misinformation and disinformation in the media,” Þórisdóttir said.
And Jóhannsdóttir said she sees journalists in Iceland taking seriously their responsibility to counter falsehoods in political discourse, despite widespread budgetary concerns within the media sector. (Iceland has public media outlets, but historically it has offered fewer subsidies to private media than other Nordic countries have.)
“This is a role that journalists here have taken to their heart,” Jóhannsdóttir said.
While Iceland has no equivalent of a PolitiFact — a dedicated fact-checking outlet — it does have a website called the Icelandic Web of Science, launched 25 years ago by the University of Iceland.
The site primarily has experts answering reader-generated questions like “Is it true that carrots can cure night blindness?” “Where is an explosive eruption most likely to occur in Iceland?” “How deep down to the ocean floor have humans gone?” and “Why is the Arctic Circle moving?” But at times, particularly during Icelandic election seasons, the website has experimented with political and policy fact-checking.
During my visit, the site’s editor-in-chief, Jón Gunnar Þorsteinsson, pumped me for advice on how the publication might expand that role. “I’m wondering if we can start something like PolitiFact or Snopes,” Þorsteinsson said. “More and more, it’s about answering what people ask about — myths about all kinds of misinformation.”
Jón Gunnar Þorsteinsson, editor in chief of the Icelandic Web of Science, at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. (Louis Jacobson / Poynter)
In general, Iceland seems to have escaped large-scale disinformation campaigns by foreign actors, Þórisdóttir said, particularly compared to the Baltic nations, which are more directly battling Russia in an information war.
But experts expect foreign disinformation efforts to increase during the lead-up to a planned 2027 referendum on whether Iceland should return to talks about joining the European Union.
“The Icelandic-specific disinformation we have seen so far has been domestically produced,” Bergmann said. “But there is growing worry now that this could change during the upcoming referendum on the E.U.”
Already, experts here worry about an uptick in cyber scams and intrusions from other countries. In 2024, Árvakur — the Icelandic media company that publishes the widely read newspaper and digital site Morgunblaðið — experienced a cyberattack that it blamed on a Russian group. The attack took the company offline and cost the company large sums.
“Iceland is linked into the world through underwater cables,” Jóhannsdóttir said. “That is something we need to pay closer attention to.”
The other topic of concern here is artificial intelligence, which is expected to promote “a spike in misinformation,” Ingjaldsdóttir said. In her review of academic and online discourse, Ingjaldsdóttir said she sees discussion of “misinformation” having peaked in 2022 and 2023, with AI now taking over the discussion.
Hrafnhildur Fönn Ingjaldsdóttir, who has studied misinformation as a student at the University of Akureyri in Iceland. (Louis Jacobson / Poynter)
As AI gets more sophisticated, experts here said, a knowledge of the Icelandic language will no longer pose a barrier to producing questionable content.
“We always felt very protected by our language,” Þórisdóttir said. “There are very few native Icelandic speakers, so it’s not easy to fake the language. But that has changed due to AI over the past year.”
A reason AI can work so well in the Icelandic language, she said, is that Icelandic officials have made a concerted effort to ensure that Icelandic is included in the language models that train AI. Despite the small number of speakers, Icelandic has “a great body of literature online,” she said.
“It’s been an effort to maintain the language so it doesn’t go extinct,” Þórisdóttir said. “But the other side of that coin is that it makes it easier to produce misinformation.”
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