Finland Doesn't Exist: A Reddit Joke That Spread

The Story

Not every conspiracy theory starts in earnest. Some start as jokes. One of the internet's most famous examples claims that an entire country, Finland, does not exist.

The idea took off on Reddit in the mid-2010s, when a user replied to a thread asking about the strangest things people's parents had taught them. He wrote that his parents had told him, when he was a child, that Finland was not real. His explanation was elaborate, and the post spread quickly.

The 'evidence' includes fish smuggled on the Trans-Siberian Railway disguised as Nokia phones.

According to the theory, Japan and Russia secretly agreed to tell the world that a stretch of the Baltic Sea was a country called Finland. That way, Japan could fish there without anyone trying to regulate it. The fish were then said to be shipped across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, disguised as products from Nokia, the famous 'Finnish' phone company. The people who think they are Finnish, the theory says, actually live in Sweden, Russia or Estonia.

The post spawned its own online forums. In an interview with VICE in 2016, the Reddit user who posted it said that he himself believes Finland is a real country. He estimated that about 90 percent of people treat it as a joke, but that some take it seriously, a pattern often explained by 'Poe's Law': the idea that online parody of extreme views is easily mistaken for the real thing.

Debunking it is almost too easy. Finland was settled as glaciers retreated about 9,000 years ago. Its name was carved on runestones as early as the 11th century. The Trans-Siberian Railway's first route across Russia was completed in 1916, so it could not have been built as part of a later plot. And millions of people live in Finland, which has its own government, language and culture.

The joke endures because it shows how a story can be absurd and still spread. As the science writer Brian Dunning noted, the theory shares one trait with every conspiracy theory: any evidence against it can simply be dismissed as part of the conspiracy.