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How China’s army of online trolls turned on Sweden
Online trolls attack the country’s enemies... by flooding Facebook pages with angry messages
Reading Time:2 minutes
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This article originally appeared on ABACUS
The call to attack came just after midnight.
“We call upon the nation’s righteous people to gather at 20:00 on the festive day of Mid Autumn Festival, for a grand crusade against our enemy,” reads a post on Di Ba’s Facebook page.
Di Ba is an online community, estimated to have more than 20 million members. They’re one arm of China’s troll army, ready to attack anyone who may have offended Chinese people in any way, flooding their social media pages with nasty messages.
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Their target? A Swedish comedy host.
Jesper Rönndahl earned the ire of Chinese people after mocking them in a comedy segment, which was in turn produced after an incident involving Chinese tourists and Swedish police.
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A Chinese family of three tried to check in to a hostel 14 hours early, and when told that they couldn’t, asked to stay in the lobby overnight. When hotel staff asked them to leave, they refused, and the police were called to remove them.
That incident set off a flood of criticism on either side. And then Rönndahl’s segment took things to a new level. His network, SVT, argued that it was satire. But China’s foreign ministry said that it was full of discrimination, and China’s embassy in Stockholm called it “outrageously insulting”.
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