@Sweden Twitter curator Sonja Abrahamsson offends with racist tweets

I often have to remind myself that social media—while useful and positive in many instances—gives people who don’t often think before they speak an outlet for voicing inappropriate and idiotic ideas. Take the Twitter storm that emerged after The Hunger Games movie premiered. A myriad of offensive, racist tweets flooded the online social media website from “fans” upset over the casting of several characters. Or what about Brock Anton, who participated in last year’s Vancouver Stanley Cup riots? He thought it would be a great idea to brag about it on Facebook.

Today’s social media face-palm moment comes courtesy of @Sweden, a Twitter account belonging to the National Board for the promotion of Sweden and curated by the country’s citizens. Conceptually, this sounds like a pretty innovative idea: create a Twitter account and select one of the nine million Swedish citizens to tweet from the account each week. It’s a cool idea until you have someone like Sonja Abrahamsson running the account. The 27-year-old mother of two, who describes herself as “a single and low educated mother… [who] don’t do drugs and prostitution”, has caused a bit of a shitstorm since she took over this week.

On June 11, Abrahamsson started the day by tweeting “I seriously need to get some eggs before I starve like an African child. Even if its not possible. In Sweden we have great social security.” A while later, she followed that tweet, which was met with angry responses, by voicing her thoughts on Sweden’s Princess Madeleine: “Once I had a strong feeling that Swedens royal princess Madeleine had an abortion. I was all like ‘oh boy now the fetus is gone’.”

The prolific tweeter—we’re talking an average of half a dozen tweets per hour—began to really draw attention (and piss people off) when she decided to start tweeting about Jews.

"Whats the fuzz with jews. You can't even see if a person is a jew, unless you see their penises, and even if you do, you can't be sure!?"

"In nazi German they even had to sew stars on their sleeves. If they didn't, they could never now who was a jew and who was not a jew."

"Once I asked a co-worker what a jew is. He was 'part jew"', whatever that means. He's like 'uuuuh… jews are.. uh.. well educated..?'"

"Where I come from there is no jews. I guess its a religion. But why were the nazis talking about races? Was it a blood-thing (for them)?"

Oh dear.

A New York Times article published on June 10 noted that embarrassment is a given when you’re tweeting from the nation’s Twitter account, which is followed by more than 35,000 people. The first @Sweden curator, an 18-year-old high-school student, misspelled finish as Finnish in one tweet; another curator listed “masturbating” as one of his favourite leisure activities. However, no Swede seems to be attracting as much negative international attention as Abrahamsson.

Even when Abrahamsson’s week on @Sweden is up, she will continue to broadcast her worldly insights on her personal Twitter account @hejsonja and her personal blog.

You can follow Michelle da Silva on Twitter at twitter.com/michdas.