This opinion piece discusses a targeted campaign by far-right youth reporters to use defamation lawsuits as a means of attacking anti-racist reviewers. The author, who themselves was targeted by a lawsuit, describes how these reporters create viral videos through schoolyard bullying tactics, such as confronting staff in art galleries and filming in churches that offer activities for migrants. They then use social media to spread the names and home addresses of their targets. The author argues that the lawsuits are part of a larger plan to silence investigative journalists, and calls for greater awareness of the campaign.
The aim is to be able to accuse investigating journalists of being criminals
This is a cultural article which is part of Aftonbladet’s opinion journalism.
During the industrial holiday last year year, a defamation lawsuit landed in the letterbox. The lawsuit was shortly followed by another. I had reviewed New Times, the biggest far-right tabloid newspaper. My texts were about how a newspaper with a media support of five million kroner could have an editorial office where half of the reporters wrote under pseudonyms. I knew why they hid their collaborators, several members of the editorial staff were parallelly active in Nazi organizations.
My texts in newspapers and books were published in publications with a publisher’s certificate. Freedom of the press is strong, but the same protection did not exist for my posts on social media and participation in podcasts. Now one of Nya tider’s employees had sued me because I described him as “one of Sweden’s most notorious convicted Nazis” in a tweet five years ago where I linked back to my review.
It was something strange with this slanderous mood. It happened in parallel with a series of personal harassment directed at me and several others. Someone tried to request information on my living and dead relatives. Filmed in the area I lived. Offered payment to whoever could submit pictures of my family’s children. Neighbors told me that a car registered to New Times had been up and investigating my family’s shacks and flying a drone over them. My phone number was posted on social media with calls to inform me that I was a “criminal suspect” and needed to respond to the summons.
It was easy to see where the harassment was coming from. New Times had started a new youth venture, a sister company called Exakt24 with the aim of specializing in more confrontational and outreach video reports, adapted for Youtube and Tiktok. Sweden Democrat Erik Almqvist led the project and gathered an editorial staff of newly formed high school students linked to the far-right party Alternative for Sweden.
The fines are admittedly low, but by bombarding the judiciary with reports it could still be costly for the victim
The kid reporters took schoolyard bullying with them and launched it as investigative journalism. They entered the Gothenburg Art Gallery’s shop and held the staff accountable for books about Greta Thunberg (“left-wing propaganda in museums”), filmed in churches that had activities for migrants (“here they hide illegal refugees”), took a hidden camera into RFSL’s youth activities (“they organize trans camps for children”) and filmed drag queens who guided pre-school children at Dramaten (“sexual activism aimed at minors”). Videos that went viral. Each video was followed by the spreading of names and home addresses on the social media accounts of the video activists.
I realized that I wasn’t the only one who was sued for defamation. That this was set in a system and that there was a plan behind who was being sued. My old colleagues in the freelance collective Researchgruppen were also sued. Same thing with Henrik Johansson from the anti-racist site Not racist but.
The second suit against me was for my participation in Henrik Johansson and Axel Luo Öhmans podcast “Haveristen”, where we discussed New Times. Johansson and Öhman were both sentenced to SEK 5,000 each in damages to the same person who sued me. Employees of the magazine Expo had also received lawsuits against them. The defamation lawsuits were part of a targeted campaign against anti-racist reviewers.
The young Exakt24 gang were clear about their purpose. Every night they would sit in Twitter’s Spaces chat room and talk out loud about their plans. The aim was to let the left get a feel for its own methods. The left was given a very broad interpretation, where everything was kept from Robert Aschberg’s exposing netizens in “Trollhunters”, David Bass video confrontations for Expressen, Nähatsgranskaren’s lawsuits against Joakim Lamotte, Juridikfronten’s repeated reports of Nordfront’s responsible publishers for incitement against ethnic groups to Antifascist Aktion’s hangings of Nazis. No method was too rough to resort to, it was still just “karma” and a “backcake”. With the right-wing election victory, the hour of revenge had struck and it was now time to give back.
In the chat rooms told the extreme right’s kid reporters how they systematized the harassment. They carried out campaigns with false reports of concern to social services, contacted the fire protection authority and reported left-wing premises, sent letters to neighbors and employers about “left-wing extremists”.
In December, they talked about their new project, to form an association to carry out mass voting. They had discovered that simplified civil cases were cheap to pursue. Small claims are for settling simpler disputes and do not entail any financial risks in case of lost cases. The fines are admittedly low, but by bombarding the judiciary with reports it could still be costly for the victim.
So it was about using legal processes as a weapon. Every legal process would also create content, just be a means to create material for new postings and reports.
When Erik Almqvist visited Sweden in March to document the defamation case against Axel Luo Öhman, the new legal activist group was launched. Exakt24 left the media ethics system, was put on ice and reborn as the Defamation Ombudsman. The ambition is to drown journalists who examine the extreme right in small cases, in a legal carpet bomb.
The purpose of the Defamation Ombudsman is not to counter defamation, but to use legal processes to defame. Being able to call investigating journalists criminals and criminals in the extreme right’s alternative media. They try to exploit legal loopholes where freedom of the press and publisher protection are not covered, so that journalists will not be able to discuss their reports in social media.
Before my trial I was asked if I wanted to agree to a settlement with the New Times reporter. I was offered to participate in the trial via video link from a secret location. But I insisted that there be an open trial. Not for my own sake, but to bring everything out into the light.
The defamation lawsuits may seem innocent and banal. But the deliberate use of lawsuits, on an industrial scale – in the Defamation Ombudsman’s own words – becomes a question of freedom of speech, of what can be written, said and scrutinized. Where the extreme right with threats, lawsuits and personal harassment wants to silence reviews and break digging journalists. If we let them.
Every review, every trial, every campaign by them needs to be made visible. The puzzle of harassment against individual journalists, opinion leaders and politicians needs to be put together for the whole picture to emerge. Here you have my piece of the puzzle.
On Friday, the ruling came, and the district court decided that Mathias Wåg be acquitted.