views on social media.
Enter the President of the United States.
It’s doubtful that Donald Trump had any idea of who Horowitz was, or whether he had any journalistic credentials. In general, he appears predisposed to believe Fox News tells the truth and that the New York Times tells lies. So – after his stump speech in Florida – the President then broadcast the existence of Horowitz’s gonzo docu-tainment to his 40 million-odd followers on Twitter.
Thus were half-truths blasted around the planet’s new global information eco-system.
This horizontal transmission of news – from person to person – is virtually unmappable. But let us suppose that hundreds of millions of people around the world would by now have registered – at some level – this . . . germ.
I use the word ‘germ’ in the absence of another easy label. The exercise Horowitz was engaged in, and which the President and Fox News megaphoned, was not conventional journalism. These were not ‘facts’. Deeply buried in some of the assertions in a ten-minute film there may even have been some semi-truths. I will not call the rest ‘lies’. The point is that most of the hundreds of millions who will have been touched by the germ will not have registered the detail. They will not have researched the origins of Trump’s Swedish intervention or looked into Horowitz’s techniques or motivations.
The virus is likely to have lodged itself as little more than a perception, in those ready to believe, that Muslim immigration leads to unspeakable things such as mass rape – and that the west had better wake up. A couple of days after Trump spoke there was some rioting in the northern suburbs of the Swedish capital, Stockholm. No smoke without a fire? But which was the smoke, and which the fire?
The patient analysis and denials of Swedish newspapers counted for little as the virus spread. In the UK the former UKIP11 leader (and friend of Donald Trump) Nigel Farage used his radio show on LBC to announce that Malmo, a city in southern Sweden, was now the ‘rape capital of Europe and, some argue, perhaps even the rape capital of the world. And there is a Swedish media that just don’t report it.’12
*
Months later I was browsing through my Twitter feed and saw someone I follow – Godfrey Bloom, a leading UKIP figure and former Member of the European Parliament – retweeting news of a horrific attack on a teenage girl in Malmo. Someone calling himself @PeterSweden7 tweeted about his ‘blood being at boiling point . . . While she was being raped the rapists poured lighter fuel in her vagina and set it on fire. MSM is quiet. RETWEET.’13
This germ was so graphically specific and shocking that it caused understandable revulsion as it ricocheted around the internet. On the social media website Reddit there was a bitterly angry thread. The attack was said to be the fourth rape in two months. It was taken as read that the attackers were Muslim immigrants. If you let Muslims into your country – so many commenters raged – what do you expect?
This was war.
But did the incident – with the obscene barbarity alleged by @PeterSweden7 – actually happen? That was a more complicated question and would take more than a day of patient digging to get near any kind of truth.
A 17-year-old girl had undoubtedly been raped that evening in Malmo – and the attack had been widely reported in the press. But @PeterSweden7 was right to say that newspapers had made no mention of lighter fuel being poured into the victim’s vagina and set on fire. Was this out of political correctness, or because it hadn’t happened?
I tweeted an appeal for help in getting some facts. A couple of Swedish journalists sent me links to reports in the so-called MSM. I tried to read both . . . but, in each case, hit a paywall. One wanted me to commit to £9 a month before it would allow me to read the article; the other wanted nearly twice as much.
Chaotic information was free: good information was expensive.
In the horizontal world of twenty-first-century communications – where anyone can publish anything – the germs about rape in Malmo spread indiscriminately and freely. The virus was halfway round the world and the truth had barely even found its boots. Truth – if that’s what journalism offered – was living in a gated community.
But the truth mattered. The idea that immigrants would reward a society’s compassion by barbarically raping its women could – if true – profoundly shape popular attitudes and political responses to immigration in Sweden and beyond. That was especially true now Donald Trump – and numerous white nationalists and their fellow travellers – were using the country as a prime exhibit of the dangers of open borders.
I did my best, as a non-Swedish speaker, to establish some facts. For a start, who was @PeterSweden7? Many of those exploiting the horrific lighter fuel story belonged to far-right extremist groups around the world. @PeterSweden7’s previous tweets gave some clue to his politics: ‘I don’t like fascism, but i think hitler had some good points. I am pretty certain that the holocaust actually never happened.’14 Or another: ‘The globalists (mainly Jews) are ones bringing in the Muslims to europe. They seem to work together.’15 He had 81,000 followers on Twitter, growing at a rate of 10,000 a month.
I contacted @PeterSweden7, who appears in real life to be Peter Imanuelsen, a 22-year-old photographer born in Norway, but possibly living, at least some of the time, in North Yorkshire. He told a website called hopenothate.org.uk that his holocaust-denial was simply a phase brought about by realising that ‘mainstream media was lying about everything’. Imanuelsen described this website as ‘fake news’. His own website claims to be ‘real independent journalism’.16
Via Twitter he repeated to me that Swedish media hadn’t gone into detail ‘on the horrible things the girl suffered’. I asked his source. He replied that ‘word has gotten around in Malmo about the details and locals in Malmo have taken to social media to say what happened’.
So, a combination of local rumour and gossip, amplified instantly by horizontal transmission.
He later pointed me to a Facebook posting by a 37-year-old Chicago-educated researcher, Tino Sanandaji, who is considered to be the most prominent social media critic of Sweden’s immigration policies, and also of the established media.
I tracked down Sanandaji. He had, indeed, blogged about the incident to his 76,000 followers. He said he had two sources, ‘one citing the police investigation and one friend of the family . . . the same rumour was also on social media’. He was ‘fairly sure’ about his information, and he thought he had a duty to warn girls in the area after three rapes in Malmo in the space of seven weeks.
But here was the rub. Sanandaji claimed that the detail that had caused such revulsion and sent the germ around the world was not in his Facebook posting in its original Swedish, ‘underliv’ – or so he claimed. He claimed to have written that a source had told him that the victim’s ‘abdomen’ had been sprayed with fuel. By the time it had been picked up and redistributed by a Canadian-based British ‘journalist’ working for the alt-right website Breitbart, ‘abdomen’ had become ‘vagina’.17 Whether Sanandaji’s
