Sweden’s Tweeter for Week Missteps on Jews
A guest tweeter on Sweden’s official Twitter account raised hackles over some racially charged comments about Jews.
Sonja Abrahamsson, 27, who identifies herself as an unemployed single mother from a small Swedish town, immediately apologized for the tweets, saying that she did not mean for her questions to be offensive. “I just don’t get why some people hate Jews so much,” she said.
Every week a regular Swedish citizen is chosen to be in charge of the official state account, @Sweden, which its curators call “the world’s most democratic Twitter account.”
On Tuesday, Abrahamsson, who said that there are no Jews where she lives, first made a crass comment about how to identify a male as Jewish. She then tweeted: 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.
She continued: 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..?”
Abrahamsson had also made inappropriate remarks about other groups of people.
Her remarks drew some criticism from fellow tweeters.
It appears Abrahamsson will be allowed to finish out her week as guest tweeter.
“It’s very important for us to let everyone take a unique viewpoint,” Tommy Sollén, Social Media Manager at VisitSweden, told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “Every one of our curators is there with a different perspective.”
Abrahamsson is the country’s 24th guest tweeter.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
