Employees at Sweden’s national news channel, TV4, were last month told to avoid wearing clothing or badges that might identify their employer’s logo in public. The security risk was deemed too big. The advice was made in response to increased threats against the station and its reporters after its investigative programme, Kalla Fakta (Cold Facts), alleged that the far-right Sweden Democrats – the second biggest party in Sweden – operated a vast network of anonymous social media accounts, coordinating attacks on political opponents and the media.
Sweden is one of the world’s strongest democracies, with very high levels of trust in its media and political institutions. But journalists covering domestic politics now have to fear for their safety.
Swedish media outlets have reported on nationalist “troll farms” in the past, but a TV4 journalist spent a year working undercover at the communications department of the Sweden Democrats. The channel said it was able to confirm at least 23 social media accounts run anonymously from the department. In just three months, posts from these accounts got 27m views across social media platforms.
The reporting suggests that this is the tip of an iceberg of misinformation and ultra-nationalist hate speech coming straight out of the publicly funded offices of a party on which the governing coalition relies for support. In hidden camera shots, party strategists were also seen coordinating secret attacks on political opponents, including conservatives who were deemed insufficiently loyal to the Sweden Democrats’ cause.
What was truly remarkable wasn’t the revelations of anonymous accounts, but the response from the Sweden Democrats leader, Jimmie Åkesson, in a so-called “speech to the nation”. Åkesson not only refused to apologise, but also launched a fierce attack on the news media. The entire programme, he claimed, was disinformation; part of a “gigantic, domestic influence operation by the left-liberal establishment” with a secret plan to “demoralise” far-right voters ahead of the EU elections. In follow-up interviews, Åkesson stayed on the attack, often using bullying, condescending language to make fun of reporters for asking about the scandal.
This is a new, dangerous phase for Swedish democracy. By launching a frontal assault on the legitimacy of the news media, the far right has raised the stakes for the future stability of Sweden’s democracy.
The conservative coalition, which is running the country with parliamentary support from the Sweden Democrats, has responded tepidly to the scandal. The prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, first condemned the anonymous accounts, but later backtracked, adopting a strategy of whataboutery, attacking the main opposition Social Democrats over an old controversy in which a a briefly active anonymous blog post turned out to be from a student wing of the party. “Such hypocrisy. Such hypocrisy,” Kristersson complained.
Unsurprisingly, this response went down well with the nationalists. Josef Fransson, a young MP for the Sweden Democrats, praised Kristersson for not taking action against his party, and rather terrifyingly used the term ljugmedia, a phrase with echoes of Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi slur, Lügenpresse (the lying media).
Without any formal sanctions against these anonymous troll farms, the far right can now continue to operate these accounts and expand their reach. Åkesson’s reactions got tremendous traction on social media, reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers within a few days on Facebook and YouTube. The opposition’s responses received only a fraction of that audience.
As Renée DiResta of Stanford Internet Observatory writes in her book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, the harsh truth of our new social media-dominated news cycles is that “if it trends, it’s true”.
Of the far-right memes alleged to have been anonymously shared by Sweden Democrats’ staffers and members, many are from openly racist and antisemitic American hate groups, along with Holocaust-denying cartoons, pro-Russian content and deep fakes of political opponents. One employee has been put on leave after the newspaper Expressen revealed posts where he expressed support for Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.
One of the videos shared by Sweden Democrats’ troll farm showed an animated Åkesson driving a military tank, painted in the patriotic colours of the Swedish flag, through Rinkeby, a Stockholm suburb known for a large working-class, immigrant population. He’s holding a sword, next to a cartoon frog who is shooting from an automatic weapon (the frog, a Swedish children’s television character, was embraced by Swedish nationalists as their version of Pepe the Frog, an unofficial symbol of American far-right groups). The video was met with harsh words from some conservative members of parliament, but Åkesson himself found it hilarious. “I’m still laughing at it,” he responded when asked for a comment.
Consistently, Åkesson dismisses criticism by saying that people who can’t laugh at these memes lack a sense of humour. Anyone familiar with the history of antidemocratic movements knows that this is a well-worn tactic. In 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of Nazi apologists in France at the time: “They are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly … They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”
The intimidation appears to be working. In a recent study by the Union of Swedish Journalists, 39% of reporters admitted to self-censoring to avoid threats and harassment, particularly when it comes to stories involving racism and immigration.
“When democracy’s key players, journalists, researchers and politicians, fall silent, democracy is already in trouble,” writes Åsa Wikforss, a professor of philosophy at Stockholm University and a member of the Swedish Academy.
For too long, our dangerously unregulated digital commons have been poisoned by misinformation and hate speech, and the consequences are now global. The US-Filipina journalist and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa recently addressed the international democratic crisis in a speech at Harvard University. Ressa did not just place the blame on the despots and wannabe dictators of the global far right, but also on the tech companies for allowing misinformation, hate speech and troll farms to grow and fester, suffocating the truth. “Without facts, you can’t have truth, and without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these three, we have no rule of law, no democracy.”
This is a particularly serious challenge for Sweden and its neighbours. The Nordic model is built on high trust in governing institutions, in the media, in academia and science, as well as interpersonal relations. When the Scandinavian countries were all clustered at the top of the UN’s World Happiness Report recently, the report specifically referred to the high levels of trust in these countries. More than 60% of Swedes still say that “most people can be trusted”. But for how much longer?
In the European elections on 9 June, the Sweden Democrats performed worse than expected, their first real electoral shock. After the results were announced, party leaders were quick to blame the media – particularly TV4 – for the disappointing performance.
If trust in the political news media is being undermined by such sustained attacks, so is political accountability, and perhaps eventually truth itself.
Martin Gelin writes for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter
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