Imagine this scenario:
The New York Times writes a positive A1 story about your organization’s Twitter account, and on the day the story hits newsstands your social media manager fires off several questionable tweets about Nazis and the holocaust, as well as a tweet that seems to question the intelligence of Jewish people.
You’d probably need a drink (or something to calm to your nerves).
On Monday, that very scenario happened to
@Sweden, the nation’s official Twitter.
Sweden is six months deep into an interesting social media experiment. The country (with the help of advertising agency Volontaire)
turned its Twitter account over to its citizens as part of The Curators of Sweden, a campaign by the Swedish Institute and VisitSweden, which gives one person a week control of the @Sweden Twitter handle.
“Sweden stands for certain values—being progressive, democratic, creative,” Patrick Kampmann, Volontaire’s creative director,
told the Times. “We believed the best way to prove it was to handle the account in a progressive way and give control of it to ordinary Swedes.”
The
Times pointed out that diversity of voice also brings provocative content—though the handle has a disclaimer indicating the tweets aren’t the opinion of the entire nation—such as the first @Sweden voice, who won the nickname the “masturbating Swede” after he shared his favorite leisure activities.
But in the wake of the profile on Monday, the latest voice of @Sweden, Sonja Abrahamsson, a 27-year-old mother two, tweeted her way into some controversy.
Here are a few of her remarks, which angered a number of people:
Perhaps she should stick to tweeting about “
strawberries dripping in urine” and “
Justin Bieber.”
(via
The Atlantic Wire)