STOCKHOLM — Facing a tsunami of misinformation about the treatment of Muslims that has fueled protests from Stockholm to Baghdad in recent months, Sweden has decided to strike back.
He turned to the Psychological Defense Agency, part of his Defense Ministry, created last year and which has become the first line of defense against a sustained attack of information from abroad.
The main disinformation threat today—though not the only one—is Russia. According to agency officials, the Kremlin has made Sweden the target of an online campaign to discredit the country and undermine its bid to join NATO.
The agency has explicitly accused Russia of exploiting recent protests by immigrants and others in Sweden that included the burning of the Koran, an act deeply offensive to Muslims.. The resulting outrage has delayed Sweden’s entry into NATO over the objections of another member, Turkey.
“They were on a level we’ve never seen before,” said Mikael Tofvesson, the agency’s director of operations, referring to Russian efforts to amplify the global online reaction to a protest outside Stockholm’s largest mosque on June 28.
Ulf Kristersson, the Prime Minister of Sweden, said that “States and state actors” were “actively exploiting” the protests in Sweden.
The Psychological Defense Agency raised political concerns when it was proposed, but its leaders have stressed that its mandate allows it to address only foreign sources of disinformation, not Swedish-generated content.
Since the agency’s creation, Sweden has faced intense disinformation campaigns beginning in late 2021 with posts on Twitter, YouTube and other platforms expressing anger over an Iraqi immigrant in Sweden whose children were removed from his custody by protective services. child of the country
The accusations turned into false claims that Sweden was abducting Muslim children and forcing them to eat pork or violating Islamic traditions, which spread online in Arabic-speaking countries, including Turkey. In fact, the immigrant was not a Muslim.
The allegations have persisted online, including on a YouTube channel with nearly a million subscribers that first circulated them. One of Russia’s state television networks followed up this year with a report involving an ethnically Russian immigrant family from Latvia, saying that Sweden did not allow children to speak Russian, which is not true.
According to the Psychological Defense Agency, Russian online accounts and state media have also amplified Quran burning protests over the past two years — in Russian and Arabic — across the Middle East. Some researchers have suggested that the Russians helped instigate the protests.
Magnus Hjort, the agency’s director general, and other agency officials declined to detail evidence of Russia’s role, and the agency has produced few public reports on foreign disinformation campaigns.
Hjort said the agency was in regular contact with the social media platforms, but did not request the removal of the accounts.
“What we see now is a full-blown, full-scale war in Europe,” Hjort said. “And Sweden is not neutral.”
By: STEVEN LEE MYERS
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6851558, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-08-16 19:50:16
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