cross-posted from: https://kbin.earth/m/europe@feddit.org/t/318601
If a social media account is spreading Russian disinformation - does sharing content from the account give it legitimacy?
No, says Carl-Oskar Bohlin, Minister for Civil Defence. But at the authority the minister is responsible for, the answer sounds different.
— In any case, you spread something that a foreign power might intend to spread to make us worried, says Mikael Östlund, press officer at the authority.
It was a year ago that Carl-Oskar Bohlin shared a tweet from the American influencer Lauren Southern, known for her far-right advocacy. The original video warned of how AI is used in influence operations, something the minister forwarded to his around 45,000 followers. “The ability and height of the impact operations risk increasing avalanche-like with disruptive technology shifts,” wrote Carl-Oskar Bohlin on X.
Now, an American indictment against two Russian government employees shows that the production company Tenet media, where Lauren Southern is employed, must have been secretly financed by the Russian news agency RT. A total of just over SEK 100 million is said to have been transferred from the Russian state employees to the American company. In turn, influencers would push specific issues—such as questioning support for Ukraine—to their millions of followers. On YouTube alone, the videos have received more than 16 million views.
In light of the American indictment, Carl-Oskar Bohlin has been criticized for not checking his sources better. But the Minister of Civil Defense lets the tweet stay on X.
“For the simple reason that it is difficult to misunderstand.” writes Bohlin to DN.
“One should of course refrain from spreading harmful narratives from foreign powers. However, it is a somewhat strange indictment that my warning about deepfakes and doctored videos would in itself constitute Russian disinformation. With such a threshold, it will be difficult to talk about or warn about the phenomenon at all,” continues the minister.
Carl-Oskar Bohlin is responsible for the agency for psychological defence, MPF. Countering misdirection and misinformation, including rumor spreading and propaganda, is one of the agency’s main missions.
In case you wonder, mr. Bohlin is from the conservative party (Moderaterna).
I’ve always found it a bit funny that one of the Swedish conservative parties is called the Moderates. They pretend they’re “centre right” like every fucking conservative seems to, because for whatever baffling reason they lack the spine to call themselves right wing. “Nooo you can’t call me right wing, that hurts my feelings – I’m centre right and a moderate! But anyhow, Hitler was right and trans people and leftists should be put in death camps, and here’s some Russian propaganda for you that proves all this”
The far right wants people to think they are the center because it lends them legitimacy. It’s why “weird” works so well against them.
They also have a personal, psychological need to be “normal”. They can’t stand the thought that other people aren’t like them–or maybe even more importantly: that they aren’t like “normal” people.
Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians talks about this in some detail.
compared to most of Europe’s right, they have historically been pretty moderate. but then last election cycle they opened the door to collaborating with the far right because they would have lost otherwise…
Yeah but that’s exactly it though: they’re not very moderate if they really have no qualms about collaborating with the likes of SD.
It’s the same here in Finland too, the “moderate” and “fiscally conservative” National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) is suddenly pretty much indistinguishable from the far right Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset) now that they’re in a 100% right wing government. They’re eg. loosening the punishment for denying the Holocaust, blocking the progress of a law that would ban “conversion therapy” (ie. psychological violence to turn people straight), their MPs are now openly racist, and so on.
Feels like “moderate” conservatives are just waiting for an excuse to drop their masks. One of my former acquaintances who is supposedly a moderate KOK voter told me straight up that the world would be a better place if gender minorities (like me…) didn’t exist.
i mean yeah. for them it was just that they made a big deal of refusing to even talk to SD as little as four years ago, but that all changed when they dropped in the ratings.
on the flip side, “weird” things have been coming from SD the more mainstream they’ve become. following internal pressure from their gay and minority members (i know right?) their policies on things like gender issues have moved leftward, at least on paper. of course, the purpose of the system is what it does, so i don’t trust them to actually do anything of that, but it seems that some people in there actually care about the politics.
Huh, surprising to hear that at least “officially” SD’s gotten slightly less… well, nazi.
Also, love the Stafford Beer quote 😀 Honestly “the purpose of the system is what it does” is an excellent heuristic.
He retweeted that ‘AI can be used as a disruptive force in politics’. Which is obviously true, but the one who made that original claim had ties to the news agency RT, and therein was the problem.
And that about covers the whole story, really. It’s not very interesting, really.
It’s not really surprising. Even the government agency that is supposed to monitor foreign misinformation in Sweden have participated in an interview with Epoch Times. That, and the politics of the current government makes it not not very surprising.
Edit: oh, its the same guy. Lauren Southern and Epoch Times. This is a marvelous fuck-up.
What the heck is going on in Sweden? For the last few years, most of the news coming out of it seems pretty weird.
how long have you got?
- in the 90s, we started privatising a shitload of institutions which has started coming back to bite us now, most notably when the govt said “we will build a nuclear power plant” and the now private energy authority Vattenfall said “no”.
- we fucked our schools up completely by having municipalities foot the bills for local schools, which of course means that schools are now worse in poorer communities. also we structured it so each child is worth a set amount of tax money to the school and opened the door to privately funded schools, meaning tax kronor are now disappearing into foreign-owned private schools such as Engelska Skolan. Literacy and math proficiency levels have been falling for 15 years as a result.
- we seem to have made it our national sport to add layers of bureaucracy to jobs, with one study finding that swedish doctors spend more than 70% of their time doing paperwork. the system is leaking money as a result.
- our system of “expertmyndigheter”, governmental organizations of non-elected experts on particular subjects meant to advise the elected, seem to be increasingly ignored in favor of populism.
- during the big European migrant wave of the 10s, we failed to come up with a coherent integration plan and people instead moved to where others from their region already lived, leading to insulated communities that the press has called “parallel societies” because they have no need to integrate.
- these neighborhoods have been affected by all of the above, which have made them poorer, less literate, and detached from the society around them, which has in turn made them into prime recruitment material for criminal gangs. children as young as 9 have been arrested for drug running, and 13-year-olds have been caught looking to do hits advertised through social media.
- our current right-wing government wants to be seen as “tough on crime”, and so as violent crime has spiked, so has arrests. this means our prison population has skyrocketed, and the prisons are also recruiting grounds for gangs.
- children, of course, go to “special youth homes” (SIS) or “closed youth care” (SVU) instead of prison, but it turns out those places were badly run even before this whole mess and are not only led by unqualified personnel, but are also used for recruiting by gangs.
tr;dr: we sowed 30 years ago, and we are currently reaping.
Conservatism and neoliberalism destroy yet another country for profit! Almost like there’s a pattern…
Both the left and right wing (except the most radical right) parties in Sweden propagated mass immigration which is now such an enormous burden to deal with.
Yes, because of the non-existant integration. It started with Ebo-lagen in the 90’s that allowed immigrants to settle where they wanted, leading to aforementioned issues.
Yeah they were so big on immigration that now a substantial part of the population doesnt speak swedish because they dont have enough money/teachers to teach them proper swedish. A lot of people speak miljonsvenska(kind of a mixed language between swedish, english, turkish, arabic, etc) or just speak their own language. This creates dense pockets of crimes. In stockholm for example you can live a few metro stops from rinkeby, a place where theres a lot of crime, but you dont notice it because it doesnt leak out. Of course everyone is starting to notice how bad it is because sometimes it spills out.
They elected a right-of-centre minority government which depends on the local neo-Nazi party (the “Sweden Democrats”) for votes and so panders to them. They’re halfway into their term, and polling suggests that it’ll be a 1-term government, with a left-of-centre coalition almost certainly taking over in 2026.
Sweden has slowly been going insane right wing (and the rest of Scandinavia too, but more slowly). They failed to treat the Nazis in their society seriously and have allowed racism and conspiracy theories about immigrants and such to fester.
The right is in this for the long haul, too. When Anders Breivik (aka Fjotolf Hansen) blew up a bunch of people, who did he target? He targeted a camp full of future political leaders. He wanted to kill the next generation.
Every modern society has Nazis in it but you can’t have a modern, advanced, peaceful society if they get any power. You have to fight them and their bullshit wherever they appear.
Are you ok Sweden?
They are not.
But it’s entertaining to see the current government doing lappkast in their politics from the election turned out to suck balls and threaten with steep EU fines.
