p3x.deSwedish minister responsible for the agency countering misinformation retweets Russian propaganda channel - stands by it
aasatruwww.dn.se/sverige/ministern-for-civilt-forsvar-…
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).
11 Comments
Comments from other communities
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.
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.
lime!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.
kescusayWhat 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.
AllNewTypeFaceThey 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.
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.
t�mAre you ok Sweden?
I would expect the head of a government agency for psychological defence to be citing own sources and investigations, or, at least, from respected research organizations, rather than from an “influencer,” not matter who this is. The fact that Lauren Southern is far-right figure makes the thing even worse. (And, not to forget, a government official should not use Twitter at all.)
Yeah, at this point "minister of anything tweets anything at all" should be damning enough. Doesn't matter that you tweet, you're still helping Musk promote fascism.
Ooooh, it’s the same guy! I thought the psycological defence guy was someone else. No, OK, this guy is just pure misinformation then, he also participated in an Epoch Times pod as the head of that agency.
Has anyone told him he can preface sharing things like this with a joke or snarky comment, to make it clear the information is good but from a shit source? “Even a total asshole of a broken clock can be right twice a day” or something might be sufficient.
I mean, that’s not his belief though.
I haven’t seen the video in question, but i doubt it’s a harmless warning.
If you make a comment critizing a specific piece of propaganda, then you have to reference it. Claiming that quoting or referencing something is an “endorsement” of that thing, is complete nonsense.
The situation is different: He uncritically shared a video warning about AI disinformation which itself came from Lauren Southern, a far-right, Russian-financed influencer. I.e. the video he shared was probably unproblematic in itself, but it led people to a problematic account, without any type of warning.
Oh okay, thanks. That makes sense then yeah.
I couldnt read the linked source and wasnt really able to understand it well from the post summary.
Sorry about that - I also found the original Swedish article to be a bit of a confusing mess.
I think, as a public servant and especially a minister supposed to be responsible for curbing misinformation, you have a responsibility for which sources you use. As a public representative, using a source grants it legitimacy. If you later learn that a source you helped promote was run by by a hostile disinformation campaign, it's clear that you have messed up, and you need to do something to redeem the situation.
Full translation (courtesy Bing):
> ## SWEDISH POLITICS: The Minister of Civil Defense does not take down tweets whose content may have been funded by Russia > >If a social media account spreads Russian disinformation – does it give it legitimacy by sharing content from the account further? > > No, says Carl-Oskar Bohlin, Minister for Civil Defense. But at the agency the minister is responsible for, the answer sounds different. > > “In any case, they are spreading something that a foreign power may intend to spread in order 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 right-wing extremist opinion-making. In the original video, there was a warning about how AI is used in influence operations, something the minister passed on to his around 45,000 followers. “The ability and effectiveness of influence operations risk increasing avalanche-like with disruptive technology shifts,” wrote Carl-Oskar Bohlin at X. > > Now, a US indictment against two Russian government employees shows that the production company Tenet Media, where Lauren Southern is employed, is said to have been secretly financed by the Russian news agency RT. In total, just over SEK 100 million is said to have been transferred from the Russian government 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 are said to 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 leaves the tweet on X. > > “For the simple reason that it is difficult to misunderstand,” Bohlin writes to DN. > > “Of course, one should refrain from spreading harmful narratives from foreign powers. However, it is a somewhat strange accusation that my warning about deepfakes and manipulated 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,” the Minister continues. > > Carl-Oskar Bohlin is responsible for the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency, MPF. Countering deception and disinformation, including rumours and propaganda, is one of the Authority’s main tasks. > > When DN reaches press officer Mikael Östlund, he gives general advice on how to think about senders who are known to have both left- and right-wing extremist views, and how to avoid becoming part of influence operations. > >"It’s about evoking emotions. If you get upset by something you read, you can think about it. Is this someone who wants to upset me? he says. > > If you share information from an account, do you give that account legitimacy at the same time? > > "In any case, you spread something that may not be true. And which a foreign power intends to spread in Sweden to make us worried. Or to influence public opinion. Or make us distrust information in general even more. I’m not going to say that you’re guilty of anything, but you should think about it, so that you don’t share things that someone else with an evil intention wants you to share. > Is it extra important to double-check what the original source is if you are an influencer or a public figure with a large following? > > "Yes, that applies to everyone, but if you have a lot of followers in general, it’s more important maybe that you don’t share things that you’re not sure are true. > > Carl-Oskar Bohlin is the minister responsible for your agency and has done exactly what you warn about. How do you see it? > > "You have to ask him about that. We do not register what is shared and published in Sweden. Our task is to watch when foreign powers direct information from abroad towards Sweden in order to influence us. > > How should one interpret that the minister’s message goes against yours, as you just described it to me? > > "We give general advice, we don’t have any messages of our own. The general advice is that you should know why you are sharing. You should think carefully so that you do not unknowingly become complicit in spreading foreign information. > >In an updated version of the tweet, Carl-Oskar Bohlin has written: > > “Clarification to avoid active misunderstandings: The purpose of the post is not to draw attention to the sender who is highly controversial, but to demonstrate the tools that this type of actor will use in the future,” the minister writes.