So Long @sweden — Here Are Some Highs And Lows From The Country's Shared Twitter Account
After close to seven years, the grand experiment that was @sweden — the country's shared Twitter handle, passed from person to person each week — is coming to an end.
Launched in December 2011 by the Swedish Institute (a governmental cultural institution), the country's official tourism company Visit Sweden and marketing company called Volontaire, the "Curators of Sweden" project has let over 350 people steward the @sweden account with very, very little in the way of oversight. With just shy of 150,000 followers, @sweden has enormous reach for an account that was usually operated by mild-mannered Swedish citizens, residents and expatriates who rarely seemed interested in talking up the country's best vacation spots.
In a statement to Swedish publication The Local, a representative for the Swedish Institute said that the account's "geographic reach is simply not enough," as the majority of its audience resides in the US, UK and Sweden itself. Though the account may not have done a great job of promoting Sweden to the wider world, its curators' tweets and the newsworthy stories that came of the account will serve as a fascinating encapsulation of life online from 2011 through 2018. Let's look at some of the more interesting — for better and worse — curators to have run the @sweden account:
The Very First Curator Went TMI Real Quick
Writer and marketer Jack Werner was given the keys to @sweden on December 10th, 2011.
From the get-go, Werner wielded the platform with a sense of humor: "You're following me because you're interested in Sweden, right? Wrong! You're interested in what I do! Thats what you're interested in now." Werner proceeded to answer some questions about Sweden, tweet innocuous jokes and post about mundane personal matters — along with the occasional comments on how odd it was to have tens of thousands of people reading all of it.
Then, on the 16th, someone asked what Werner was up to and he replied… earnestly? "I guess I'm drinking a lot of coffee, lighting my face up with my laptop and hanging out w friends. Oh and, you know, masturbation."
You couldn't ask for better blog fodder, today or in 2011, than a person using a big important Twitter account to talk about wanking. He did it more than once, later tweeting this gem: "Wasting a day on pizza and BF3 is like masturbating: feels great while you're at it, but later you're like 'what am I doing with my life?'" In hindsight, it's great that Werner got to break the seal on the account — where someone else might've tried to put on a respectable facade, Werner's "whatever" attitude was far more interesting.
The Kid Who Could Tweet In Class… For His Country
Then 18-year-old curator Erik Isberg became the subject of a New York Times profile when he took over @sweden in June 2012. Tweeting from the modest town of Trollhättan, Isberg kept things pretty chill with talk of soccer, "The Wire" and his fondness for sleeping in. Isberg did use his platform to shed light on one point of national pride: his school's lunch offerings.
The authorities at his school waived their usual rule against in-class tweeting (one teacher told Mr. Isberg he could skip all his classes, if he needed more time to post). When he posted enticing photographs of the school lunch buffet one day, he got so many envious responses from places like Saudi Arabia and Britain that he passed them along to the cook.
School cooks rarely get compliments from anyone, let alone from students around the world. "He was overwhelmed," Mr. Isberg said.
Unfortunately, the good vibes from Isberg's lunch lauding did not last long, as the next person in line to run the @sweden account became its most infamous curator…
When A Troll With A Big Twitter Platform Was News
Sonja Abrahamsson was given control of @sweden the day after the Times wrote about her predecessor, and with 24 hours she tweeted the following: "Before WW2 Hitler was one of the most beautiful names in the whole wide world. I know. Its as chocking[sic] as dolphin rapists."
The next day Abrahamsson asked "whats the fuzz with jews" — whether outright anti-semitic in the mode of "just asking questions," sheltered and painfully ignorant or just an "edgy" troll, Abrahamsson did not win over anyone with these tweets save for anything-goes free speech defenders and white nationalists.
Stephen Colbert, in his "Colbert Report" persona, made a plea to get a crack at the account after Abrahamsson's bad conduct went viral. After being turned down by the account's administrators, Colbert launched a campaign with a cheeky hashtag (#artificialsweedener). In 2018 it's pretty hard to find anything funny about a hashtag campaign in response to Nazi stuff on Twitter — now we know they do jack squat.
When Trump Preemptively Ruined A Guy's Week
Max Karlsson wasn't planning on making headlines for his week running @sweden, but President Trump forced his hand. At a rally in February of 2017, Trump said there had been a terror attack a night earlier in Sweden when no such attack had occurred. The following Monday, while Trump was busy simultaneously walking back his claim and attacking Swedish immigration policy, Karlsson started a threaded fact-dump on Twitter challenging the President's fearmongering.
Karlsson gamely kept the pressure on for his whole week at the reins, though not without struggles. "Honestly," he tweeted towards the end, "it's also been quite exhausting. Abusive comments, accusations and pics of extreme violence numbs you down."
Blocklists Aren't The Greatest Idea
In the wake of 2014's lead-up to the hell we live in now, Twitter more-or-less had all the same problems it does today, only lots of people thought that with the help of shared blocklists they'd be able to remedy the site's ills themselves. If you're not familiar with the idea of shared blocklists and why they have a habit of failing in practice, just look at why actor Wil Wheaton ended up leaving Twitter — long story short, whether their blocking is justified (they're nasty or abusive) or no (they're part of a group that the list's author discriminates against), when you block thousands of people on Twitter at once, those people get mad at you.
Curators of @sweden were already allowed to mute and block abusive users (Karlsson up above did), but in 2017 curator and self-described online safety expert Vian Tahir took things a step further and applied a blocklist that affected 14,000 accounts. Suffice to say, it did not take long for the list to create a stir and the Swedish Institute ultimately chose to unblock all the accounts. Naturally, any governmental agency wants to be pretty careful about who it recognizes as making "threats against migrants, women and LGBTQ people," no matter how inconsquential the platform or how reasonable the blocklist actually was.
Just Some Good Tweets
Digg has highlighted the hilarious video work of Seth Everman on the site before, but it's worth closing out this look back at @sweden with some of Everman's tweets as its curator this past August. He didn't tweet much from the account, but his infrequent dispatches produced some quality gags:
Honestly, trading our teeth away for no more PewDiePie is a compelling offer. Thanks for that, @sweden.
You can check out all the @sweden curators at the "Curators of Sweden" project's official archives. The project is scheduled to end on September 30th, 2018.