00:03Hello, you're watching The Cube, here on news fact-checking show.
00:07Citizens in Sweden headed to the polls on Sunday with preliminary results showing the center-left
00:13coalition in the lead. However, amid the election, researchers say thousands of suspicious accounts
00:19have been following people involved in Sweden's political debate. Such as this account, at first
00:25glance, it appears to belong to a Swedish woman named Ingrid Carlson, but researchers say the
00:31profile uses a stolen photograph, rarely publishes its own content, and is listed by X as being based
00:38in Benin, West Africa. According to research from Dutch analysis company Trollver6 and the
00:45Nonprofit Alliance for Europe, it is part of more than 8,500 X accounts that show signs of belonging
00:52to a coordinated network. Their investigation, in collaboration with Swedish broadcaster SVT,
00:59found that many of the accounts presented themselves as local Swedish users while being listed by X
01:05as based in Nigeria, Ghana and parts of Asia. These accounts published few to no posts themselves.
01:13Instead, they follow large numbers of genuine Swedish political accounts across the political spectrum.
01:18We've also found accounts in Sweden, accounts that were following a lot of Swedish people
01:25that started out as Dutch accounts and were following Dutch people. And another funny thing
01:31was that we found accounts that used a profile picture, which was also used in the Netherlands before.
01:38The investigation suggests that this behavior could attract attention to these profiles,
01:43inflate their popularity, or prepare the accounts for future influence operations.
01:49This suspected network is one of the many potential threats that have emerged around Sweden's election.
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