Bulgaria ranks last in the European Union in terms of resistance to the spread of fake news. Of the 35 countries, including all Balkan countries, only Turkey, Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Macedonia are worse than Bulgaria (place 30).

These are the findings of a new edition of the Media Literacy Index for 2021 by the European Policies Initiative (EuPI) of the Open Society Institute – Sofia.

The index assesses the resilience potential to fake news in 35 European countries, using indicators for media freedom, education and trust in people.

As the indicators have different importance, they are assigned different weight in the model. The media freedom indicators have the highest weight (Freedom House and Reporters without Borders) along with the education indicators (PISA) with reading literacy having the highest share among them. The e-participation indicator (UN) and trust in people (Eurostat) have smaller weight relative to the other indicators.

Bulgaria is in the same group with Greece, Romania, Serbia, Turkey and Montenegro, but the first two countries have actually worsened their positions since 2017 (and have become similar to Bulgaria), while Turkey is improving its (and only coming out of the last group) in the ranking.

Finland (1st), Denmark (2nd), Estonia (3rd), Sweden (4th) and Ireland (5th) are at the top of the ranking of the Media Literacy Index 2021 in Europe.

These countries have the highest potential to withstand the negative impact of fake news and misinformation due to the quality of education, free media and high trust among people. As in previous years, Finland remains No 1 among the 35 European countries included in the index.

The countries in the bottom of the ranking are North Macedonia (35th), Bosnia and Herzegovina (34th), Albania (33rd), Montenegro (32nd) and Turkey (31st). These countries have low potential to deal with the effects of fake news and misinformation mainly due to underperformance in media freedom and education.

When the scores and ranking of the countries are compared between the 2017 and 2021 editions of the index, the biggest overall improvement is registered by Estonia, Sweden and Ireland, which are good performers anyway, occupying 3rd, 4th and 5th place in the index 2021. The overall deterioration in both their scores and in the ranking over the years is registered in the cases of Latvia (20th place in 2021), Slovenia (14th place in 2021) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (34th place in 2021) as they worsen their performance along the main indicators of the index.

The index cluster analysis shows certain geographic patterns as the best performing counties are located in clusters in Northwestern Europe and the worst performing countries are located in the Southeaster part of the continent.

The changes in clusters when the indexes of 2021 and 2019 are compared seems to point to a deterioration in the situation as a number of countries backslided to lower-tier clusters.

The report recommends education as the optimal approach to tackling fake news as a “vaccination” offering resistance against the worst cases of fake news and post-truth. Dealing with fake news and disinformation would dial down the temperature of political and social debates – and confrontations – would improve trust in societies and would contribute to a healthier environment (figuratively and literally) in the Covid-19 pandemic.