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Wallström targeted by Russian Twitter attack

TT/The Local
TT/The Local - [email protected]
Wallström targeted by Russian Twitter attack
Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström. File photo: Janerik Henriksson/TT

Fake statements attributed to Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström have been posted by Russian Twitter accounts, reports Aftonbladet.

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Wallström is scheduled to meet with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow later this month.
 
According to the embassy, a false quote, claimed to have come from a question and answer session at Lund University, has been retweeted a hundred times.
 
The quote, originally in Russian, translates to: "Living in the civilised world: Sweden's foreign minister calls for castration of white men".
 
The Swedish embassy in Moscow has now taken to Twitter itself to counteract the false tweets.
 
Warning: Fake! Reads a tweet posted by the Swedish embassy with a screenshot of an article using the offending quote.
 
Several similar tweets are said to have been posted, reports news agency TT.
 
"There is a problem with misinformation and quite a lot of inaccuracies about Sweden and Swedish politicians are unfortunately being spread. Sometimes it is a case of innocent trolling but there is also a certain amount of genuine misinformation designed to distort and create a negative image of Sweden. This is naturally a serious problem," Wallström's press secretary Pezhman Fivrin said to Aftonbladet.
 

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