Whoopsies. Sweden's Twitter Campaign Gets Predictably Trolled

Where: Sweden

June 13, 2012 at 2:54 PM | by Omri | Comments (0)

And now boys and girls, another object lesson on why skepticism is the proper response to advertising strategists and reporters who tell you that social media is magic and that engagement means letting everyone be heard. We have to do these posts every few years because our rants never seem to take hold, least of all with travel journalists and tourism boards.

Let's go back all the way back to four days ago Sunday. The New York Times publishes a puff piece about Sweden's Twitter initiative, done of course at the behest of an advertising agency, to "entrust the country's Twitter account [@Sweden] to a new citizen every seven days." Look how social! Look how effing authentic! To be clear, there was a point during which we actively adored the account, but that was when the guest curator was posting lamb photos every few hours.

With comedic perfection, literally one day after the NYT celebrated how effing real the whole thing was, the week's citizen tweeter Sonja Abrahamsson began by observing that—quote, sic, etc: "Before WW2 Hitler was one of the most beautiful names in the whole wide world. I know. Its as chocking as dolphin rapists." Not what you want from a country described by watchdog groups as a center of anti-Semitism.

The 27 year-old mother of two—who we'll remind you was tweeting from a government account on behalf of an entire nation—then went on what Slate calls an "epic and bizarre Twitter rant about 'Jews.'" We're not going to post all the highlights, which you can find here, but our favorite selections include "whats the fuzz with jews" and "where I come from there is no jews."

Given her other contributions and her background information, the prevailing theory is that Abrahamsson is just a straight-up troll. In her other tweets she described debates over Judaism as "infected," posted a photoshopped picture of Freddy Mercury looking at food with the caption "hungry gay with aids," and made a joke about shopping for eggs lest she "starve like an African child." The account has also been negative on Justin Bieber, which is pretty much the definition of trolling.

In any case Sweden is defending their choice to let her write because "it's very important for us to let everyone take a unique viewpoint." Really? Everyone? How charmingly naive, and how delightful to find someone who's still new to the Internet (Sweden, meet the YouTube comments section; YouTube comments section, Sweden). And thus did an entire country end up in our bad ideas category.

[Photo: screenshot]

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