A police officer stands guard after an object exploded next to a police station in Rosengård, Sweden in January 2018 JOHAN NILSSON/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

On an underpass leading into Malmö’s Rosengård district, graffiti spells out: “Home is where your heart is”. It’s corny, but apt in a district where more than 80 per cent of people were born abroad or have at least one foreign parent. Demographics in suburban Malmö are testament to Sweden’s recent refugee policy: the area’s residents come from Lebanon, Iraq, the Balkans and, most recently, Syria.

Here, the city centre’s tall townhouses have been replaced by 1960s housing blocks that squat on either side of the main road leading east. Locals amble past shops that sell Bosnian burek or Turkish sweets. A group of children on bikes skid under Zlatan’s Bridge – named after former Manchester United striker Zlatan Ibrahimović, who grew up here. Their frenzied race traces the bike lane that cuts through Rosengård’s centre, past shops, the falafel truck and a pink painted playground.


Compared to the outskirts of cities in France or England, this place is quiet, colourful, clean.

But online, Rosengård has an infernal reputation. The area has been labelled a ghetto; a no-go zone. Internet trolls – including bots, far-right news sites, and individuals – hold it up as proof that liberal immigration policies lead to society’s breakdown. American alt-right websites, Breitbart and Infowars, describe Rosengård as a place where “ethnic Swedes dare not tread”, ramping up an image of a segregated society that spells the beginning of “Sweden's migration-fueled collapse”.

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These websites and their Swedish equivalents blame immigration explicitly for crime. With a general election on September 9, the far-right Sweden Democrats are the ones benefiting from this narrative.

According to different polls, the party – which wants to stop asylum seekers coming to Sweden altogether – could take around 20 per cent of the vote. That is unlikely to install them in power. But in liberal Sweden, even one fifth of the vote is liable to be claimed as a victory by Europe’s populists – the collection of right-wing, Eurosceptic parties lionised and sometimes advised by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon.


Sweden’s election has weaponised Rosengård. Online, the area is portrayed in a way that urges Swedes to vote for harsher immigration policies. On a tour earlier this year, Sweden Democrats’ leader Jimmie Åkesson described Rosengård as a “skräckexempel” – or a warning – to the Nordic region. Members of his team have even called for the army to take control of the neighbourhood. In the party’s apocalyptic election campaign video, images of car fires – a problem which plagued Rosengård for some weeks back in 2016 – are a menacing backdrop to Åkesson’s explanation that immigration is responsible for a rise in crime and a collapse in welfare. In an effort to gain viral momentum, the Sweden Democrats have added English subtitles on their YouTube videos. One has nearly a million views.

Rosengård does have a problem with crime. Part of the district has been categorised by police as a “vulnerable” area, prone to poverty and violence. Earlier this year, the police station was bombed. Under a tree, next to a ‘No Parking’ sign, a photo frame of a man smiling in sunglasses sits on the pavement, encircled by candles and flowers – a memorial to the latest shooting victim.

But the reasons behind these problems are more complex than where a perpetrator was born. Liberal Swedes blame unemployment and failed integration policies. “Swedish ‘Karl’ is always going to get the job over ‘Mohammed’,” says Christian Glasnovic, who has worked as a youth worker in the area since 2011, and is the founder of Rosengård’s first political festival Malmedalen.

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In the lead-up to the country’s general election on Sunday, the struggle between nuanced reality and sensational disinformation has become more urgent. Sweden’s online far-right has been mobilising, with a recent study by the Swedish Defense Research Agency noting a dramatic surge in Twitter bots using Swedish political hashtags since July.


As the country’s polls project the far-right rising to unprecedented popularity, researchers are asking how much the spread of disinformation online is influencing voters.

An apartment building on a housing estate in Rosengård, Sweden. The district of Malmo has become an online battleground for the country's far-right BJORN LINDGREN/AFP/Getty Images

Sweden has long been plagued by its trolls. In Scandinavian folklore, they would emerge from lonely forest huts to dabble in cannibalism or kidnap eligible maidens. Today the Swedish trolls dwell on the internet. Their modern day incarnations have become agents of the populist far-right, spreading what ranges from fake news to exaggeration and decontextualised facts. This disinformation tends to criminalise immigrants and skewer Sweden’s liberal status quo.

At the heart of Sweden’s network of internet trolls is its thriving far-right media sector – also known as “partisan” or “junk” news. These sites have an agenda, trading in disinformation and conspiracy. According to Reuters’ 2018 digital news report, the most popular “partisan” sites are Samhällsnytt, Nyheter Idag, and Fria Tider. They’re popular – around ten per cent of the population reads them weekly. One in three news articles shared on social media about the Swedish election are from similar sites.

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Samhällsnytt has close ties to the Sweden Democrats. In 2013 — when it was called Avpixlat — formerly prominent party member and MP Kent Ekeroth (who has not been put forward as a candidate in the upcoming election due to various controversies) made a donation to the site from his personal account. In 2017, the outlet’s new website was registered under Ekeroth’s name.

In a report released last month, the Swedish Defense Research Agency found that Twitter bots are ardent supporters of these “partisan” news sources, regularly sharing their stories on social media. They promote far-right political parties too, supporting not only the Sweden Democrats but also with the little-known Alternative for Sweden – a radical party that advocates for the repatriation of immigrants.

The origin of the bots is still a mystery. Oxford University’s Internet Institute can’t tell who programmed them. The Swedish Prime Minister has alluded that Russia may be behind the disinformation, but researchers believe the majority of bots come from inside Sweden, as they speak the language fluently.

Oxford University’s Ralph Schroeder, who worked on the Swedish Defense Research Agency report, says wherever the bots come from, they are designed to skew the election by amplifying only one side of the debate. “Efforts at disinformation by automated behaviour are increasing and it’s spreading a disproportionately populist right-wing message,” he says. “This is not a form of genuine discourse, because it’s automated. Why else would you use a software programme? It can only be that you’re trying to make certain groups more visible. That’s worrying.”

Schroeder is not the only one who is worried. For years, Swedes have been fighting fake news and online harassment.

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Between 2014 and 2015, Swedish TV aired Trollhunters, a reality TV show in which journalist Robert Aschberg would track down anonymous internet trolls, confronting them with their history of online abuse to see their reaction. A third season is due to air on TV3 this autumn. “The need is as big as it was last time, if not more so,” Aschberg told the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.

Even before that, six years ago, tabloid newspaper Expressen wanted to set itself apart from fake news. It started to embed two links at the bottom of each article, inviting users to report inaccuracies. “Except for facts being a natural part of our journalism Expressen wants to be as transparent and responsive as possible around these issues,” says Klas Granström, Expressen’s head of digital.

Ordinary Swedes are sometimes taking it upon themselves to challenge disinformation, devoting their spare time to debunking rumours about no-go zones on Reddit and Quora, or even filming videos that poke fun at far-right panic.

But these efforts might not be enough to keep trolls at bay anymore. Income inequality has been growing faster in Sweden than in any other OECD country since the 1980s. Among a population that is used to defining itself as a successful society, changing economics have created an opening for skeptics of the Nordic model (high tax, wide-reaching welfare), who have morphed into trolls.

The Swedish Institute of Law and Internet is a non-profit law firm that takes a small number of trolls to court each year. The organisation aims to make the internet a better place by representing people who have been the target of online hate or revenge porn.

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In the lead-up to the election, the institute’s chairman Ängla Eklund is concerned about how trolls are trying to shut down the political debate. “People who are discussing politics or are involved in politics are being targeted to a greater rate,” she says. “The trolls usually aim to silence someone, to harass them to the extent that they will stop publicly speaking. They want to create self-censorship”.

This seems to be working. A 2018 report by The Internet Foundation in Sweden found that 27 per cent of Swedes had refrained from expressing a political opinion online to avoid harsh criticism or threats.

In the fight against online harassment, traditional Swedish tolerance has become a hindrance, not a help, says Eklund. The country’s extensive protections for freedom of speech create challenges. Suddenly, Swedes are being forced to question which of its fundamental rights are most important. “You have the right to not be subjected to hate speech,” Eklund says from her office in Stockholm. “But Sweden’s long tradition of prioritising the freedom of speech makes it difficult for us to protect people legally online.”

Unlike other European populist politicians, Åkesson has resisted collaborating with Bannon and his nascent Movement foundation. But Sweden still fits a regional pattern, where voters disillusioned with globalisation turn to the far-right, and the country has become a rallying cry for global populism. The increasingly coordinated far-right movement is using Sweden to illustrate why immigration does not work.

This narrative has leaked into mainstream politics. In 2017, Donald Trump told a Florida rally to “look at what’s happening last night in Sweden” – a nod to a Fox News feature he had seen the night before, linking immigrants to Swedish crime. Just days later, Nigel Farage suggested that Malmo could be the “rape capital” of the world.

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The international far-right focuses on Sweden because the country is an emblem of liberal democratic values. Populists use the narrative that even Sweden can be ripped apart by immigration in order to push for harsher immigration policies in their own countries.

Henrik Selin is head of intercultural dialogue at the Swedish Institute, a government agency that promotes Sweden abroad. Until recently, he was used to seeing a positive image of Sweden online. “The focus was on the welfare state or how we combined strong market economy with equality and a robust welfare system,” he says. “But that changed in 2016.”


In the aftermath of the 2015 refugee crisis – during which Sweden took in more refugees per capita than anywhere else in Europe – the country became a flashpoint for international, far-right media outlets. Breitbart, Infowars and Voice of Europe started reporting on Sweden’s domestic issues through the lens of immigration. After visiting Rosengård in 2017, Breitbart’s Raheem Kassam, warned, “For young women... you take you life into your hands when you enter these areas.”

Selin says this negative attention comes from a “small but very loud minority”. But the Swedish Institute is still working to counter these narratives online. “We try to be fact-based and nuanced about our country”, says Selin. After Trump’s comments in 2017, the Institute helped the Ministry for Foreign Affairs publish an English-language myth-busting guide about immigration.

But on social media, nuanced facts are struggling to be heard over the volume of disinformation. Today’s election will be the first test to see if the noise they have created has had real impact on the Swedish electorate. If the Sweden Democrats receive as much of the vote as some polls predict, it will be the latest populist victory to send shockwaves across Europe. Perhaps then more troll-hunters will try to confront the trolls lurking in Swedish society.