In a hidden recording, an SD employee tells Kalla fakta’s reporter that the accounts are internally referred to as “troll factory”. But party leader Jimmie Åkesson rejects that it would be:
– What TV4 wanted to show was a troll factory and misinformation. So they haven’t managed to do that, but these are the humor clips they came up with after a year of infiltration, he says to SVT.
“Confoundingly similar”
On one of the designated accounts there is a video with Magdalena Andersson that has been edited to make it sound like she is saying “together we can destroy Sweden”.
In the caption of the video it says “Social Democrats Unofficial Official Election Film”. SD’s communications director Joachim Wallerstien rejects that the claim in the video would be disinformation, but tells Cold Facts that it is an opinion.
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A video published on a Tiktok account that in TV4’s hidden recording is described by an SD employee account as “ours”. Photo: SVT/Tiktok
Bengt Johansson, media researcher at the University of Gothenburg, thinks you can always be critical when you don’t dare to be open about the opinion formation you do.
– Making this type of political satire is not something new, but if you did something like this in the past, you were clear that it was different caricatures. You could see that it wasn’t real. Here it is confusingly similar and then you start to approach the limit of misinformation, he says.
“You balance right on the edge”
Mattias Svahn, researcher at the Total Defense Research Institute, is on the same track and believes that the humor and satire make the whole thing a gray area.
– It is difficult to draw a line between satire, discussion and misinformation. Harsh rhetoric and hate speech are not misinformation per se.
Svahn believes that if the purpose is for the recipient to believe it in substance, then it can be misinformation. But if the recipient is meant to feel an emotion but not necessarily believe it, then it is traditional propaganda.