Last night in Sweden Part 6

From SocietyNews yesterday
Government spends ten million on 'countermeasures' in election campaign.
Ten million kronor will be spent between now and the election on "countermeasures" against disinformation. This is what Minister of Justice and Home Affairs Morgan Johansson (S) and Henrik Landerholm, Director General of the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency, said at a press conference today. According to Mr Johansson, the background to the multi-million investment is Russian propaganda and disinformation.
- We have all seen how a Russian propaganda machine has been pumping out completely crazy lies about the background to the war for quite some time. That Ukraine would be ruled by Nazis, that there would be a genocide of Russians in Ukraine and so on. Those kinds of crazy lies," says Morgan Johansson.
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- At the same time, we have seen increased aggression in Russia against free media and against free voices in general. The country is moving more and more towards an authoritarian dictatorship, he continues. The ten million will go to the Agency for Psychological Defence to develop "countermeasures" in the form of "public information campaigns" to "increase resilience to disinformation". Henrik Landerholm, Director-General of the Agency for Psychological Defence, told the press conference that foreign powers are trying to "divide the population" by exploiting political issues such as crime and social unrest, migration issues, NATO cooperation and economic and supply issues.
READ ALSO: Government's new proposal: ban 'racist' newspapers.
- Truth is the first casualty of war, says Landerholm.
- That applies to all sides in a conflict. The information environment we live in now is an interesting combination of truth, lies and very much in between.
Censoring Russian media
The EU and Sweden decided in early March to censor Russian media such as RT and Sputnik by banning their broadcasts within the Union. Both the EU and the US have also put pressure on online platforms to shut down the two Russian news outlets.
The decision to censor Russian media is condemned by Reporters Without Borders, the European Federation of Journalists and the Swedish Journalists' Union, among others.
Norway has chosen a different path, and does not censor Russian media.
- Freedom of expression is central here, but so is our ability to pass on information and contribute what we believe is credible news coverage that can reach countries outside us," Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said earlier this month.