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By most human accounts, Sweden's latest social experiment of letting random Swedes control the country's official Twitter account, has been a bit of disaster after Sonja Abrahamsson, a topless-appearing 27-year-old shared her curiosity about Jews. But if you ask number-crunching robots, it's been a huge success. With a stream of questions reminiscent of Henry Blodget's recent episode, Abrahamsson wondered "Whats the fuzz with jews?" and attracted attention all over the world. The BBC deemed the campaign "marred by 'Jew' comments." The New York Times called it a "sour note," at Slate it showed "profound ignorance," and the New York Daily News concluded the experiment had gone "from politically inspired to politically incorrect." But those are all humans. Looking at the algorithmically-driven web analytic tools, Abrahamsson's performance this week was a social media coup—and not just because of the extra followers (though those always help).
Popularity
If the Internet has taught us anything it's that trolling breeds success, so long as the metric for success is eyeballs. Clearly, tweets like "You can't even see if a persona is a jew, unless you see their penises" or "in nazi German they even had to sew stars on their sleeves" caused an uproar. But they also caused a subsequent windfall in follows as the account went from 31,000 followers on Monday to 58,000 followers today, according to Twitter analytic tool Twitter Counter. (For what it's worth, Sonja appeared to show some remorse following the rant.)
Im sorry if some of you find the question offensive. Thats was not my purpose. I just don't get why some people hates jews so much.
— @sweden / Sonja (@sweden) June 12, 2012