After seven years, @sweden the twitter account will tweet for the last time on September 30. The social experiment where random Swedes have curated the account, they are all introduced here, brought some controversies over the years, and a plethora of advertising awards, including the Cannes Lions Grand Prix. a cyber silver lion and a PR silver lion.
As for controversies, there was, for example, the instance in 2012 where the world's most democratic Twitter account asked: "what's the fuzz with jews?" (sic)
Henrik Selin at the Swedish Institute who are responsible for the Twitter account ensured quizzing journalists that the curators weren't selected from a certain political standpoint, despite some of them calling the party leader of the Sweden Democrats a "racist piece of shit." Sonja's tweeting wouldn't be the last time the Swedish institute had to explain that they did absolutely nothing to in any way censor the tweets of the curators, even if the institute may not agree with the contents nor "the harsh use of language" in a tweet.
Like the time Elias tweeted about fucking someone's daughter and told another Tweeter to go "back to fucking his sister" when he wasn't stating that Swedes are "not even the original inhabitants of this country, I don't remember all you racists being Sami."
Other hiccups happened when a curator used their own personal blocklist on the accounts and preemptively blocked the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Swedish politicians, Swedish police officers, journalists and celebrities - blocking over 14,000 accounts in one go. Why? According to the curator, and "net harassment" expert, it was because those listed are Nazis", which made us wonder how the Israeli ambassador and PewDiePie ended up on that list. Conservative Politician Hanif Bali noted that the "net security expert" was hardly that, as she's only studied media to which a reader quipped that "she's more like a safe space expert."
Resumé magazine spoke to Anna Rudels, Head of the Department of Digitization and Communication at the Swedish Institute about why the promotional account is being shut down. She told Resumé that it hasn't always been easy, there was a lot of hatred directed at the account, and that Twitter today is not the same as it was seven years ago.
"It has been individual curators who have received a lot of net hate and then we have gone in and supported them. Twitter today is not exactly the same. There is much more debate today and a harsher tone on Twitter. "
Anna adds that they now want to reach further geographically, and they want to free up time and resources to come up with something new. Don't be sad as it says goodbye, the account will have Tweeted more than 200,000 times, and in the end it taught us the phrase "dolphin rapists", so that's something.
It may be gone, but it is not forgotten!
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PermalinkI've followed you on Twitter for years and never understood why they didn't ask you. You share so much about Sweden, unlike the others.
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PermalinkI'm an outsider to this day.
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