Inside the Swedish Trollfabrik

A digital astroturfing campaign ensnares one of the most successful far-right parties in Scandinavia. We could learn a lesson or two.

Jan Helin had, to that point, stuck to his guns.

But standing outside a TV studio in the fall of 2009, making smalltalk with Jimmie Åkesson, he decided to relent. Helin, editor of the Aftonbladet tabloid, would give Åkesson space for a small op-ed.

Åkesson had been leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats for four years, and hadn’t made much progress. His attempts to modernize the party beyond its neo-Nazi and skinhead past had helped double their vote share in his first election as leader, but they remained shut out of the Riksdag. His most serious coup, to that point, was to court controversy by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to the party website — which prompted the government to force their website offline.

While he snagged the occasional spot on TV, nobody wanted to publish Åkesson. They wouldn’t even carry the Sweden Democrats’ ads. His Islamophobic pablum was seen as a nonstarter for the Swedish elites, who were happy to brag that Sweden had avoided the right-wing populist trend rising in the rest of Scandinavia. Nobody could say, of course, whether that immunity was natural or acquired, so they saw their censorship of Åkesson as a public service.

But Helin was about to break this conspiracy by giving Åkesson 700 words in Aftonbladet. He used those column inches to lambaste the elite who had just held the door open a crack for him:

Today's multicultural Swedish power elite is so totally blind to the dangers of Islam and Islamization. […]

The Muslim population, if the current rate holds, has doubled in size and many of Europe's major cities, including Malmö, will most likely have a Muslim majority.

The multicultural social elite perhaps sees this future as a colorful and interesting change of a Sweden and Europe that often denies being "Swedish" or "European.”

As a Sweden Democrat, I see this as our biggest foreign threat since World War II and I promise to do everything in my power to reverse the trend when we go to the polls next year.¹²

This was all bog standard for the Democrats, although those familiar with the party might’ve been taken aback by the comparison to the second world war, given the Sweden Democrats’ ongoing dalliances with neo-Nazis. But for the unfamiliar Swedish public, thus far protected from these views by the media magnates, it was a jolt.

The op-ed was condemned, and even subject to judicial complaints. But it was also wildly effective — and it cost the Democrats nothing. The party rose in the polls, and began trolling those elites who sought to keep it out of the conversation.

In the lead-up to the 2010 election, the Democrats produced a new ad that dispenses with any kind of subtext: It features an elderly Swedish woman being chased down by a horde of niqab-wearing women pushing strollers, both racing to pull one of two emergency brakes: One marked "pensions” the other “immigration.”

Major TV networks refused to air the ad because of its, y’know, racism.

But elections everywhere were already being redefined by the proliferation of Youtube. So the Sweden Democrats threw the ad online, where it racked up hundreds of thousands of views. (Today, it’s been seen 1.2 million times. Only about 10 million people worldwide speak Swedish.)

The Democrats, not content to just connect the masses to their unadulterated Islamophobia, took things a step further: They edited the ad to satisfy the TV censors, covering up the image of the Muslim women with a message which read: “Censored by TV4. See the uncensored film at www­.sv­eri­ged­emo­kra­ter­na.­se.”

The Sweden Democrats had, in just months, pivoted from villain to victim to enfant terrible of Swedish politics. Their profile rose in the region, with Danish media in particular portraying Åkesson as a freedom fighter.

Sweden’s major media outlets tried to stem the tide. On election day, they published frontpage editorials pleading with the public to side with multiculturalism over xenophobia.

“Similarly with the Aftonbladet article and the TV4 advert, the party judged the political situation correctly – it would be vilified by the media and established parties but the message would reach potential voters,” Professor Anders Widfeldt argued in 2015.³ Widfeldt suspects the Democrats would have found a way to connect their populism with a growing public anxiety one way or another, but their troll tactics sure helped.

More than just a useful end-run around the traditional press, it gave the Democrats an enviable status of being more true than the news. It exposed the press as controlled by a cabal of unelected men with a shared agenda, and the Sweden Democrats had exposed them. The saga built up an extraordinary trust surplus with a cross-section of the electorate, particularly amongst the emerging class of the uber-skeptical very-online.

Åkesson and the Democrats doubled their vote share again in the 2010 election and then again four years later.

Today, the Sweden Democrats are the second-largest party in the Riksdag. Despite still being politically toxic, they played kingmaker in 2022 by signing a confidence-and-supply agreement to propel a center-right government to power.

But Åkesson and his party have been rocked by a scandal that has both exposed his party’s codependent relationship with the elite media it has long railed against, and which could signal a sign of things to come for other populist anti-establishment politicians in Europe and North America.

This week, on a very special Nordic edition of Bug-eyed and Shameless: The story of how Swedish politics went to the trolls.

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The Sweden Democrats are really good at Youtube.

On their official channel, they’ve racked up more than 90,000 subscribers, although their videos regularly rack up multiples of that number. The comment section below these videos overflow with effusive praise fro Åkesson.

Much of the channel is the usual boring stuff for a party’s Youtube page: Speeches and media appearances. There’s the slicky-produced propaganda videos, increasingly common in modern politics, with Åkesson in soft focuses, lamenting a Sweden that is “uglier, poorer and more dangerous” as soft droning music plays over a series of stock clips.

And they troll, too. Late last year they released a video of Åkesson delivering his remarks in Arabic, with the help of AI, decrying the “the lives extinguished by the advance of Islam in Sweden and Europe.”

The Sweden Democrats have long been far-and-away better at this than their rivals and friends. The Social Democrats, Sweden’s largest party, have fewer than 18,000 subscribers on the video platform. Other far-right parties in Scandinavia have a fraction of the Democrats’ reach.

Part of the Democrats’ secret is in their media arm, Samtiden. While it is technically a digital magazine, and a fairly clunky one at that, they have shifted moreso into video production. In 2018, they produced a feature-length documentary, chock full of historical revisionism, arguing that the traditional parties are actually the racist, backwards ones. In 2020, they launched Riks, a Youtube-first news channel that has all the trappings of a real news network, but which carries such torqued reporting as: "Your tax money goes to Islamists” and which slavishly praises Åkisson and his party.

Riks quickly surpassed the Democrats on the platform, and even sped past major Swedish TV news channels.

The Sweden Democrats have been so good at this that people started to get suspicious.

Rightly so.