I found a user-repost of an old article in newsnowfinland.fi, no idea the reputability of the site or its politics but I tend to believe it based on the fact that the “proposal” never really went anywhere nor had any momentum in Europe. I tend to be very cynical about these stories because I’ve had enough CEO’s who said similar sentiments and never made any effort to actually do the thing, because largely, liberal democracy haaaaates the idea of giving people any actual hints of socialism and social care, and tend to just serve the softer arm of capital.

How Finland’s fake four-day week became a ‘fact’ in Europe’s media

We take a look at how media outlets in the UK - and in Europe, Asia, Australia and USA - were all caught out by a Finland story that was just too good to be true. Because it wasn’t.

Have you heard the news? Prime Minister Sanna Marin (SDP) is doing something radical.

“Finland’s new prime minister, 34-year-old Sanna Marin, has announced plans to introduce a four-day week” says the Guardian, underneath the statement that Marin has “promised” a short working week.

“Finland’s new prime minister calls for four-day working week” says the Independent.

Britain’s commercial television channel ITV writes that “Finland PM calls for four-day working week and six-hour days.”

“Four-day working week and six-hour shifts to be introduced in Finland” trumpets Metro.

Meanwhile in the Daily Mail, with millions of readers every day, the headline is “Finland to introduce a four-day working week and SIX-HOUR days under plans drawn up by 34-year-old prime minister Sanna Marin.”

The story is not just confined to UK media outlets either: over the course of 12 hours on Monday it’s been repeated in a Belgian media website; and been the topic of a call-in during an Irish radio programme. It’s been published in Australia, India and the USA as well.

And it’s not true.

Not only are these proposals not included in the Finnish government’s policy programme, multiple government sources told News Now Finland on Monday evening that it’s not even on the horizon. SDP politicians and party activists gather at 120th anniversary event Turku, 19th August 2019 / Credit: Jukka-Pekka Flander, SDP

Charting the origins of the story

So how did this fake news story begin, and how did the misinformation spread so quickly?

Back in August 2019 some senior Social Democrat politicians and party activists gathered in Turku on Finland’s southwest coast, for an event to mark the organisation’s 120th anniversary.

The weather was warm, the drinks were flowing, and the Turku Workers’ Association brass band – resplendent in their scarlet blazers – played traditional tunes while the guests sang along.

After then-PM Antti Rinne had made a speech, it was time for a panel discussion.

The participants included Sanna Marin – at the time Minister of Transport; Tytti Tuppurainen, Minister for European Affairs; Ville Skinnari, Minister of Development and Trade; and Antti Rönnholm, the SDP’s Party Secretary.

They sat under a canopy on a small raised stage, with a potted ficus and some SDP banners for decoration.

A moderator posed questions and kept everything moving along, but the whole event that day was about a celebration of the party’s history rather than formulating policy – which had anyway already been enshrined in Rinne’s government programme just two months before.

At one point during the discussion Sanna Marin floated the idea that Finland’s productivity could benefit from either a four-day working week, or a six-hour working day (she never suggested both).

Marin also tweeted about it at the time, noting plainly that it was an SDP party goal to reduce working hours – but to be clear, again, this was never official government policy.

The comment got some modest media attention in Finland but the news cycle soon moved on. Composite picture showing some of the misinformation about PM Sanna Marin

Tracking the spread of the fake news story

Four months after the Turku event, on 16th December 2019, Austrian news outlet Kontrast picked up the story.

Journalist Patricia Huber quoted Marin as saying that day: “A 4-day week and a 6-hour work day. Why shouldn’t that be our next step? Are eight hours really the last truth? I think people deserve to spend more time with their family, loved ones, hobbies and other aspects of their lives – like culture. That could be the next step in our working life.”

It’s the key quote to follow here, and it matches almost exactly to what Finnish media quoted Marin as saying at the time. So in that sense it’s accurate.

The next time the story crops up is 2nd January 2020, when Brussels-based newspaper New Europe published an article by journalist Zoi Didili whose headline was “Finnish PM Marin calls for 4-day-week and 6-hours working day in the country.”

It gives the impression that this is an initiative announced after Marin became PM with the opening paragraph “Sanna Marin, Finland’s new Prime Minister since early December has called for the introduction of a flexible working schedule in the country that would foresee a 4-day-week and 6-hours working day.”

It gets several things wrong in that one sentence, and while it does reference the SDP’s Turku event, it doesn’t actually quote Marin saying there should be a four-day week, or six-hour days, and frames the whole context as if it’s a new initiative since Marin became PM.

It’s this article which seems to have sparked other stories especially in the British press, who quote Marin’s comments about people deserving to spend more time with their families, but offer no context or timeline for the original information. File image of computer, cyber / Credit: iStock

How should the government respond to fake news?

This is not the most damaging piece of fake news, but the way it’s been picked up, adapted, and crucially not fact-checked by so many otherwise credible media outlets is worrying in an era where people are quick to spread information without verifying its veracity.

“If the misinformation is harmful then you should really attempt to address it as soon as possible. But always consider that the misinformation is likely to travel faster than the truth, so you are looking more at damage limitation rather than anything more effective” says Fergus Bell, CEO of Fathm, a consultancy for the news industry with a specific focus on countering misinformation in media.

“It is useful to have a communications team that know how to spot stories that might be surfacing – this is going to be the quickest way to put out a correction as quickly as possible” he advises.

It’s sound advice, and may have been hindered in Finland by Monday’s public holiday with civil servants and politicians trying to enjoy a day off. But Bell says that countering misinformation might anyway have a limited impact.

“Because of the way misinformation can spread a rebuttal might only fan the flames of the misinformation and give it life. Drawing additional attention to it isn’t going to make it go away any faster.

I mean, if we all collectively, as a species decided we wanted a post-scarcity society where everyone is guaranteed whatever they need to live including food, shelter and healthcare, we could do it with relative ease. We have the infrastructure and technology to reduce work for everyone by a drastic degree, and many people would be freed up to study, develop science and make the system even more efficient.

But we’re not even at the point of a 4-day workweek being acceptable broadly, we’re not that unified species, we’re FAR from it. Baby steps my friend. Baby steps.

I love how it’s always former politicians and officials who come out to advocate for better things in the world.

Like, you had power when you were in office, you could have at least made the effort to broach this with the people so the next elected official with power can keep the cause alive so we eventually get better outcomes. The endorsement of people without political capital has barely a shred of power in the real world chessboard of political give-and-take.

Edit: Did some research, found what I expected, that it never even made it to government and was just “some shit she said” at an event and made a tweet about.

Plastic is an organic molecule. Think of it like a complex set of legos, and the individual lego bricks have a tendency to want to stick to other things if they get shaken. At an atomic level, everything is always shaking, all the time. So this shaking energy, over time, will increase the probability that some of those lego bricks are going to fall off and stick to other things or just fly free. There are simply more ways these lego bricks can be arranged in ways that are not plastic than ways they can.

Or another way of looking at it, there are nearly infinite ways you can break or damage a porcelain teacup, but only one configuration where it works as a cup that people can drink out of. IE: The chances of it not being a teacup anymore are greater than the chances of it remaining a teacup over long stretches of time.

What does all this mean? Your tapes are literally falling apart. Even if they’re kept in boxes or on shelves away from other energy sources like light or heat, they are still vibrating, they are still shaking. A few molecules here and there, pop off every few minutes or more, never to return. While it might be centuries before they turn to dust, these changes over time will in fact start to smear or degrade the subtle magnetic alignment in that plastic tape which is what the actual audio and video is encoded as. This may take only a few more years to be unreadable depending on the age and quality of the tape.

If you want to save your collection, invest in something to record them onto a digital medium, and even then the best you can hope for is a few more decades. Currently we don’t have many commercially available methods for long-term data storage.

I don’t know but I’ll look into it, I haven’t played an Assassin’s Creed game in so long they will probably make an Assassin’s Creed game based on the time period in which I last played one.

I would so love to have an AC game where you play a black assassin taking out slave-owners and warmongering southern landowners, it’s a universally* acceptable premise that should be celebrated and enjoyed.

* the people this would offend should be ignored like we used to.

“Okay team, we need to make this game about the American Civil war, but in a way that doesn’t touch on politics or race or offend anyone in any way, we have do whatever we can to make the Civil War seem like just some kind of completely neutral historical incident that couldn’t have been avoided, we can’t have modern slavery apologists or descendants of slaves feel ANYTHING about ANYTHING!”

Is the AI in the room with you right now?

The only thing as bad as AI zealots are anti-AI zealots.

so far has been detrimental to human societies in every measurable way

I’d like to see a source on that, and even if you have sources, I’d like to see if this fact holds true as this brand-new technology that is inarguably being exploited and misused continues to mature over the next decade. It’s possible to have nuanced opinions on technology, it won’t make you a better or worse person, just better informed.

We have to stop being dogmatic. All of us.

Seeking communities to reinforce an existing bias or emotional response to something is like saying “Where can I find less healthy food?”

Yes, it feels good and you get little dopamine hits when you say things that make people give you little up-arrows, but you’re literally walling off entire sections of your mind from growth and development.

I say this as a fierce AI critic. I could speak for hours about how it’s being used as a tool from fascists to support hate, how it’s being exploited by commercial companies to inflate stock value, how it’s being shoved into every product and system not to make our software better but to validate that inflating bubble. I could say how delusional people are about it and how it’s harming the minds of our population.

But I don’t hold these opinions as values. It’s analysis of a situation, of an intersection of ideas and socio-economic trends.

It may change tomorrow. Someone might develop an AI tool that actually benefits society. Someone might prove some aspect of it is doing more good than harm with peer-reviewed data. If that happened, and I sneered at it reflexively and ignored data and said “I don’t care what the data says, I know what I feel!” what would that make me?

It’s a technology like the internet. It’s not going away. We may rightfully hate what it is now and how it’s being used or misused, but we’re not escaping it. It’s not fucking going away.

Your choice is to be someone adapting as the environment changes, or being the old grump who whinges and whines endlessly how they don’t understand anything, just watching as the world passes by.

Use your head to guide your heart, not the other way around.

Every last CEO, internet influencer and wealthy investor in the world has “climbing Everest” on their bucket list to validate their identities and they want all their employees to see the pictures of them spending absurd amounts of money to climb a mountain and a see a view almost as high as a passenger airliner.

I’ve said for a while that Nepal and China will have to do something drastic soon.

The deaths and trash and bodies are piling up, and eventually it’s going to make the entire “adventure” so repulsive that people are going to stop spending tens of thousands to go try to climb a rock.

Either they’re going to radically restrict access to the mountain, or if they really want to keep the tourism money coming, they will have to consider developing the region. Concrete and asphalt basecamp with roads to nearby cities, facilities and helipads and a reinforced complex of resorts and hotels designed to withstand storms and with oxygen bars on every level. Stairs and guardrails all the way up to the summit and drone-patrols watching for people passing out.

They never had intention nor desire to have naval combat with Israel, they just wanted to send enough boats that it becomes more and more difficult for Israel to contain the press coverage and to create more international condemnation and pressure.

And it’s working.

Whatever else everyone says, the plan is actually working. Not nearly fast enough for all of us to stop feeling daily physical illness for the countless lives being extinguished for no reason, but nothing politically ever happens fast enough. At least something is happening.

Kidnapped and taken hostage by Israel again.

Don’t worry, I often forget that it’s 2025 also.

Pretty sure the user you’re replying to is a troll or a literal child. The rest of their conversations about this topic didn’t go much better.

Glad to know you live somewhere outside of supply chains and distribution, must be nice being entirely self-sufficient and having the ability to feed yourself if the grocery stores don’t have your tendies and pizza rolls or essential medications or antibiotics or anesthesia if you have medical problems. Must be nice knowing you don’t need to worry about fueling your vehicles or having packaging for your products or having electricity or internet.

I’m sure your entire community is also equally content and satisfied with being off-grid, and if the food stops being imported, everyone will be calm and happy.

I’m not sure how people here can say they’re against genocide in other countries while praising and fantasizing about the collapse of society. The death and suffering would outweigh anything we’ve seen so far before any kind of equilibrium is reached.

I guess you can just go ahead and have your apocalypse fantasies, you will probably continue to live in comfort even as countless people are displaced and made refugees from population decline, environmental changes and the wars that will be sparked as a result.

I would have thought a single ship getting stuck in a canal basically bringing the world to a standstill would have woken people up, but we treated it like a funny meme 😭

How many times do the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 need to explain the basics of how to make a popular game and we all treat it like deep wisdom?

I mean, I grew up basically raised by PBS and even saturday morning cartoons and thought that it would be basic, fundamental knowledge in the world today that reason and knowledge are power, that con-men will tell you what you want to hear, and not to believe people who say they’re “the best” and instead look at empirical evidence of all claims.

I thought “wow the future is going to be amazing, we have all these programs that are telling us kids how to live, how to navigate a complex world, we will have a future of starships and science and wonders!”

Now I’m here every day talking to the team I manage when they share obviously AI-generated “news articles” about scientists discovering mermaid cities and trying to get permission to spread their essential oil pyramid scheme through the company.

As a species, we are far, far stupider than we want to admit. As individuals, sure we each have great potential, but when you get more than one person in any kind of situation, the intelligence levels drop to the lowest common-denominator, and the more people, the lower that level drops.

I wish everyone worked in logistics for just like, a year or so. When you grasp how big and complex the systems are and how fragile they are to even small disruptions, you get immediately why demographic changes and population disruptions are incredibly scary.

A nation in Asia collapsing economically doesn’t mean “less people so less expenses” it actually creates ripple effects that can lead to millions of people starving on another continent.