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 coalition in the lead.
00:15However, amid the election, researchers say thousands of suspicious accounts have been following people involved in Sweden's political debate.
00:23Such as this account, at first glance it appears to belong to a Swedish woman named Ingrid Carlson,
00:30but researchers say the profile uses a stolen photograph, rarely publishes its own content and is listed by X as
00:37being based in Benin, West Africa.
00:40According to research from Dutch analysis company Trollor6 and the Nonprofit Alliance for Europe,
00:47it is part of more than 8,500 X accounts that show signs of belonging to a coordinated network.
00:54Their investigation, in collaboration with Swedish broadcaster SVT,
00:59found that many of the accounts presented themselves as local Swedish users
01:03while being listed by X as based in Nigeria, Ghana and parts of Asia.
01:09These accounts published few to no posts themselves.
01:12Instead, they follow large numbers of genuine Swedish political accounts across the political spectrum.
01:19We'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.
01:29And another funny thing was that we found accounts that used a profile picture,
01:34which was also used in the Netherlands before.
01:37The 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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