https://newsnowfinland.fi/politics/how- ... opes-media
What seems to have happened is that, at a party shindig last summer the current Finnish PM Sanna Marin (who was then Minister for Transport) mentioned that she thought it would be nice if people could work a four day week, or six hour day, and still earn enough to have a decent standard of living. She followed this up with a tweet that ends (at least according to Google translate) by saying that
This didn't get much attention at the time, but earlier this month the Brussels based newspaper New Europe reported this with the headline "Finnish PM Marin calls for 4-day-week and 6-hours working day in the country", turning Marin's utopian daydream into a concrete plan (and her "or" into an "and").A 4-day week or a 6-hour day with a decent wage may be a utopia today, but may be true in the future.
This version of the story got picked up by UK papers across the political spectrum and the Guardian, Mail, Independent and Metro were all reporting it as fact - although, to be fair to them, both the Guardian and New Europe have now corrected their articles, and you have to use the Wayback Machine to see how the story originally got reported (or read the print versions of the articles).
What's interesting is that none of the outlets involved seem to have set out to deceive. The fake newsery was driven by newspapers uncritically quoting stuff that has appeared in other newspapers without doing the - not particularly arduous - job of tracing stories back to a primary source. It is a trajectory followed by countless stories that appear in the mainstream press. A few years ago - back in the term days when "Fake News" was generally an accusation directed at Donald Trump rather than one used by him - I had hoped that the MSM might sharpen up their fact checking in order to create distance between themselves and less reliable outlets, but that doesn't seem to have happened.