Sweden #fail or @Sweden #win

I just have to air some opinions today: I think free speech is one of the most important laws/ideas of my country. And social media is great for this reason and I’m so glad we can all use it together. But since it’s late, I will, instead of writing my own opinion, share a few (very few of the many many – because this has gone viral!) of today’s “big headlines in social media” below.

• The bigger picture: @sweden and the Jew tweets is a huge success – start here and read this before you go on to the US other media below
• The Times: What the Fuzz? Swedish Tourism Board Tries to Explain @sweden�s Epic Twitter Fail – retwitted a lot today, though the Tourism Board is claiming it’s a win! Strange and false headline.
• Mashable: Sweden Twitter Experiment Goes Painfully Awry – as a journalist you’ve got to question the horrible headlines full of opinions. What we want from any reporter: the facts – as subjective as possible, pleeease!
• I rather like this one: Chron: 5 reasons why Sweden is good for the jews
• Daily Mail: Swedish mother uses country’s official Twitter page to post a photo of her breastfeeding and make foul-mouthed remarks about Jews, drugs, porn and Aids – this UK article makes it sound like breast feeding your child is something you should hide or be ashamed of… etc
• For more information about the twitter account “experiment”, read this rather amusing article New York Times: Swedes� Twitter Voice: Anyone, Saying (Blush) Almost Anything (though they got it wrong about the National Day of Sweden, it’s been the National Day since 1983, and then in 2005 it became a holiday too).
• Then… Check out @Sweden on twitter if you are curious, it’s a new “swede” each week, read more at Curators of Sweden where you can also nominate someone for the role of being themselves on twitter using the name @sweden

Sorry to do this guys, but I couldn’t stop myself. It’s a big buzz about what you can and can not say right now, and since I feel like a spokes person for Sweden through this blog (and I know many of you are Scandinavian fans) I wanted to let everyone get both sides of the coin here. Go read, think, express YOUR opinion and don’t let anyone tell you to shut up!

Disclaimer: I wouldn’t write any of the tweets that Sonja has posted this week – but instead…

…this media storm makes me think: it’s so easy to missunderstand if you want to, some words are so loaded that you can’t even say/write them at all, reading one article from one source just give you their side of the story (and it’s really upsetting when it’s a false or an opinionated one masked as the truth!), journalists don’t know everything (or sometimes anything), journalists have a lot of power, the comments on many of the articles above are more interesting than the articles themselves, politics is so complex it’s scary, it’s not strange that humans start wars and fight all the time, a few sentences can (and will!) be interpreted differently by different people so that some call them semitism and others call it anit-semitism (!) and also: words are powerful. Never forget it: words have power. I guess that is why I love to read, write and share.

I’m iHanna on twitter and I mostly write about craft and art, hehe. Or I’m iHannas in Swedish and when the US is sleeping.