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Sweden's Hitler-Joking Citizen Twitter Curator Has The World's Worst Timing

For about six months now, the country of Sweden has let everyday citizens take turns running its national Twitter feed; then on the day that program got a front-page write-up in The New York Times, the citizen-curator started making Hitler jokes.

By Adam Martin
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For about six months now, the country of Sweden has let everyday citizens take turns running its national Twitter feed; then on the day that program got a front-page write-up in The New York Times, the citizen-curator started making Hitler jokes. Sonja Abrahamsson (pictured), who took over this week from Erik Isberg, the high school student profiled by The Times' Sarah Lyall, describes herself on the Curators of Sweden website as a "27-year old womanlike human being from northern Sweden." She's clearly trying to be funny in her tweeting, but her jokes aren't landing. It's hard to get away with stuff like this:

Earlier she compared her children to horses, and more recently, Abrahamsson has been tweeting about how if her pate turns out to be made from duck, chicken, or pig liver, "I have to go and make some sweet pukin."

It's not the kind of content most governments want from their representative social media personality, including Sweden's, which asks its tweeters to "Please, do this with some dignity." But then again, that was exactly the point of Lyall's Times write-up: "If there is anything to be learned from the @Sweden experiment ... it is that there is no such thing as a typical Swede."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.