Introduction
Since the mid-twentieth century, Sweden has enshrined itself as a beacon of pluralistic, liberal social democracy. The much-admired “Swedish Model” refers, in large part, to the country’s fidelity to the folkhemmet or “people’s home,” an idea attributed to former Swedish Prime Minister and Social Democratic leader Per Albin Hansson. In his canonical 1928 speech to the Riksdag bearing the same title, Hansson proposed that “[t]he great task of honest democratic politics is…to make our country the good citizen’s home,” the latter characterised by “equality, kindness, cooperation, [and] helpfulness.” For nearly a century, the core of Sweden’s democratic project has been the unassailable trust between the government and the citizenry. Those bonds are now being severely strained. In May, Kalla Fakta (“Cold Facts”) – an investigative reporting program broadcast by Sweden’s prominent TV4 network – broke a documentary series accusing the Sweden Democrats (SD), a far-right party with neo-Nazi origins and, since 2022, the second largest in the Swedish Riksdag, of a coordinated political disinformation campaign to manipulate Swedish public opinion. This Insight will discuss the social media-enabled scandal of the Swedish troll farm, analysing its implications for Western democracies and how the public and their governments should respond.
A Scandal Strikes the Sweden Democrats
Figure 1: Screenshotted Islamophobic and xenophobic content from an SD-operated, now purportedly independent YouTube channel with over 130K subscribers as of writing. Source: YouTube.
Relying on an undercover reporter who worked first for right-wing YouTube channel Riks (Figure 1) and then the SD’s own communications department, Kalla Fakta captured on hidden-camera what various SD staffers called a trollfabrik or “troll farm,” seemingly corroborating rumours the SD has long dismissed. Among other ancillary findings, the docuseries details how the SD and Riks remain joined at the hip, with the former sharing employees, content, funding, workspace, and even regular upper-level management meetings with the latter. Perhaps most damning, however, was the revelation that the SD covertly runs at least twenty-three anonymous social media accounts propagating xenophobic, anti-establishment rhetoric primarily targeted at young voters across TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, with up to one hundred such accounts possibly in existence. Within the first three months of 2024 alone, nearly 1,000 posts from these accounts garnered a combined twenty-seven million views. Subsidized in part by public money appropriated for the SD, the alleged disinformation campaign extends to paid social media influencers, deepfakes of opposition leaders, doctored videos involving immigrants, memes drawn from the far-right’s playbook (Figure 2), and attacks on the conservative ruling coalition – in violation of the civility promised under the Tidö Agreement, which the SD officially supports.
Figure 2: Screenshotted memes from alleged SD troll accounts. L-R: “Revolt against the modern world,” parroting a 20th century cult book of the far-right; American white supremacist leader Nick Fuentes with his co-opted slogan “White Boy Summer” (WBS). Source: Expo.
Emboldened by Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s timid, deflective response and his refusal to impose sanctions banning the SD’s operation, actions reflective of Kristersson’s fractious government reliant on continued SD backing, the SD seized control of the narrative while committing only to reassigning two communications staffers and re-evaluating its social media practices. Most notably, SD head of communications Joakim Wallerstein denied managing a troll farm “for the simple reason that I have not spread information that is incorrect,” and SD leader Jimmie Åkesson labeled the Kalla Fakta reporting a “gigantic, domestic influence operation by the left-liberal establishment” in a self-entitled “speech to the nation” that has nearly 380,000 views on YouTube as of writing. Moreover, in the buildup to the June 9 European Parliament election – in which the SD received marginally less overall support than in the previous EU election but made significant gains among young voters and retained its three seats in the European Parliament – Åkesson argued that “[m]y Europe builds walls, against illegal immigration, against Islamism and – against population replacement,” invoking the Great Replacement theory in a controversial Expressen op-ed.
Implications for Democracy and its Fragility
The SD’s political disinformation campaign and the subsequent response of its leadership do more than erode the trust between the Swedish people and their government; they erode the foundations of Sweden’s commitment to the folkhemmet as envisioned by Hansson. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the SD has attempted to co-opt this very notion. Åkesson, in a 2018 “speech to the nation,” outlined a “Modern Folkhem” in which “if you’re going to settle here, then you have to have the will and ambition to become one of us.” Whereas Hansson championed an inclusive democracy that would form the backbone of the much-revered Swedish Model, Åkesson and the SD trumpet an exclusive, monocultural democracy that condones removing mosques on the charge that they are “anti-democratic [and] anti-Swedish.” Whereas Hansson helped transform Sweden from unequal and undemocratic roots to a bourgeoning social democracy in a matter of decades, the SD’s latest scandal risks setting Sweden on a dangerous, all-too-quickly irreversible path backwards.
Indeed, the SD’s manipulation of the Swedish public’s information flow should be interpreted as nothing less than a grave threat to the concept of democracy writ large. The scandal immediately drew comparisons to Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” influence campaign against America’s 2016 presidential election, which saw the surprise victory of Donald J. Trump, who the Russian government had deemed more likely than Hillary Clinton to enact policies favourable to Russia. Trump would notoriously question the assessments of Russian interference concluded by the US intelligence community – and affirmed by members of his own Cabinet – during a press conference in Helsinki. Trump went so far as to repeatedly mislabel the investigation into the 2016 election as a “witch hunt” initiated by his political opponents, language mirrored by Åkesson and his allies in the aftermath of the Kalla Fakta reporting. Adopting the Trumpist playbook, the revelations of the SD’s wrongdoing were dismissed as “lying media,” and journalists were, in fact, threatened for their reporting. In their book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead describe a “new conspiracism” afflicting the 21st century. “It takes the form of bare assertion and innuendo,” they write. “It dispenses with evidence and argument. It is embellished and spread through social media. And it is validated by sheer repetition.” Indeed, factual counterarguments have been largely absent from Åkesson’s defence—he has instead opted, much like Trump, to attack and simply repeat allegations of lies from the opposition “power syndicate.” Shared facts are not a political courtesy; they form the basis of constructive, democracy-reinforcing discourse. Falsehoods, especially when intentional, make democratic deliberation tenuous at best and a near impossibility at worst. What the late American Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously wrote in 1983 remains pertinent today: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
Perhaps even more importantly, however, in a world where information threats to democracies—from both state and non-state actors—are growing increasingly widespread and sophisticated, political parties, especially those funded by the public, must establish and protect the norms of stewardship over information. In adding to the disinformation whirlwind that has already targeted Sweden over the past several years, the Sweden Democrats are instead doing the bidding of their country’s adversaries. In fact, some of the allegations issued by Kalla Fakta relate to Sweden’s general election in 2018, a year in which the Swedish government preemptively distributed pamphlets to the public on “countering information influence activities” in an attempt to build resilience against foreign, chiefly Russian, disinformation. “One [message] is that Sweden is a country in chaos, there are way too many immigrants, crime is going up,” Erik Brattberg, then a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, warned at the time, outlining one of Russia’s primary lines of attack. Evidently, both the Sweden Democrats and the Russian government were prepared to spread exactly the same message in an effort to build their influence in Sweden. In democratic societies, electoral gains must be catalyzed through honest debate. Disinformation betrays the very ideals that democratic parties ostensibly pledge to elevate.
Restoring and Reinforcing Democracy from the Ground Up
Outlining what they term “Democracy’s Dilemma,” Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier caution that “the open forms of input and exchange that it [democracy] relies on can be weaponized to inject falsehood and misinformation that erode democratic debate.” Finding the appropriate balance between safeguarding the free, open exchange of information and thwarting its worst excesses has been a perennial challenge since democracy’s inception, which the introduction of social media has brought into more stark relief. Nevertheless, it is incumbent upon policymakers, social media companies, and relevant stakeholders to implement – at a very minimum – the commonsense countermeasures readily at their disposal today. For starters, democratic governments should invest in accessible, adaptive digital literacy programming to build resilience to mis- and disinformation amidst a dynamic online ecosystem, particularly among young people who are often the most susceptible to traps, including that, allegedly, of the SD. In addition, public officials and industry leaders should collaborate on pilot programs that test the merits of incorporating large language models and other forms of artificial intelligence in social media content moderation to offset the high content volume, language barriers, and serious mental health risks facing human moderators. Finally, democratic governments, notably the United States, should follow the lead of the European Union’s landmark Digital Services Act and begin to shift responsibility back onto the shoulders of major social media platforms by, for example, mandating various transparency benchmarks. Crucially, these recommendations represent a policy baseline relative to the bold, multipronged action necessary to meet this democratic inflection point fully. Taking such initial steps, however, will begin the defining 21st-century task of restoring and reinforcing democracy from the ground up in an increasingly modern digital age.
As Sweden embarks on an exciting new chapter in its history as a member of the NATO alliance, it cannot allow dishonest and extremist actors to corrode its democratic foundations from within. Ultimately, the Sweden Democrats would pay a modest political price for the scandal, suffering setbacks for the first time since entering the Riksdag in the European Union elections earlier this summer. Their fourth-place finish might provide hope that anti-democratic activity, when exposed, will push Western voters away from misinformative actors and towards those values of “equality, kindness, cooperation, [and] helpfulness” outlined by Hansson almost 100 years ago. In truth, however, neither Hansson nor, for that matter, the pioneers of American democracy could have envisioned that their beneficiaries would one day choose narrow political interests at all costs, including and especially democracy itself. Fortunately, the people – those who escape or reject disinformation – are democracy’s last line of defence.
Faced with a test, Swedish voters have taken a step toward preserving their illustrious democracy. Another test now beckons in America. In November, American voters have the fate of democracy in their hands.
Stephen Blinder is a student at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, where he studies Government and Philosophy. His academic work can be read in publications housed at institutions including the University of Michigan, the University of Alberta, Canada, and Georgetown University, respectively. He also serves as President of the Georgetown College Academic Council, on the university’s Provost’s Advisory Committee, as a research assistant in the Department of Government, and regularly contributes to the Georgetown Institute of Politics & Public Service’s On the Record newspaper.
Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where he studies domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism. Together with Bruce Hoffman, he is the author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. In addition to his work at CFR, Ware is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he teaches a class on domestic terrorism, as well as at DeSales University. He also serves on the editorial boards for the academic journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism and the Irregular Warfare Initiative at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and was a spring 2024 visiting fellow at the University of Oslo’s Center for Research on Extremism.