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Half of Swedes would (Insta)ban food pics

The Local Sweden
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Half of Swedes would (Insta)ban food pics
How to lose Facebook friends and alienate Instagram users? Photo: Nokia

Want to vex a Swede? Fill your social media stream with selfies and food snapshots. It doesn't matter that the former first lady is fond of a few quiche in the oven pics on Instagram, the Swedes have no taste for Facebook fingerfoods.

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When it comes to social media, Swedes are busybodies, taking and sharing more phone photos than their neighbours in Norway and Denmark. But they don't want to see your meal.

A survey by Finnish communications corporation Nokia found that half of Swedes are irritated by pictures of food showing up on their Instagram and Facebook pages. Swedes are irked more by food than by swaggering selfies, the second cardinal sin of social media. 

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Food photography is much easier to digest for Norwegians, who instead find the narcissm of selfies hardest to bear. More than 40 percent of Norwegians and Danes are also nettled by workout and gym images, while 70 percent of Swedes don't mind a sweaty snapshot.

Everyday Swedes aren't the only ones partial to snapping a few food pix and slapping them up online. Sweden's former first lady and county politician Filippa Reinfeldt, for example, has nearly 11,000 followers and the nickname  "Insta-Mama" for posting daily images that usually include food. Taco gratin, anyone? Another favourite image subject, as newspaper Expressen noted earlier this year, is Reinfeldt herself.

Not everyone is adverse to a bit of dinner-time photography, however. The Local chatted with a handful of young Swedes, only to find that they all enjoyed snapshots of others' meals.

"I love food pictures, as long as the food looks good," laughed Katarina, a 22-year-old Stockholmer. 

Elsa, 19, agreed. "I think food pictures are homey," she said. "The ones that bother me are the pictures of poor children and animals that say 'like this picture', as though liking it helps anything."

More than 3,000 Scandinavians took part in the survey, which found that one in five Swedes with a smartphone shares phone images at least once a week. Only about one in ten Dane and Norwegian shares images as often. 

Solveig Rundquist
Follow Solveig on Twitter.

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