News and Political Information Consumption in Sweden: Mapping the 2018 Swedish General Election on Twitter

In Sweden, concerns over misinformation and computational propaganda and their effect on the democratic process are on the rise. In this data memo, we analyse political news and information shared over Twitter in the period leading up to the 2018 Swedish General Election. We find that (1) Swedish political discourse on social media is about broad public issues rather than specific candidates and parties, (2) Swedish social media users are sharing more junk news — one for every three URLs being shared with political hashtags—the largest proportion of all the European elections we have studied, and (3) most of this junk news is home grown, with eight of the top ten junk news sources being of Swedish origin.