Ahead of Sweden’s parliamentary and local elections, which took place on 13 September 2026, researchers identified a large network of inauthentic accounts on the social network X. The finding was reported by the analytics firm Trollrensics and the organization Alliance4Europe in a joint investigation with Swedish public broadcaster SVT.
According to the study, thousands of accounts, mostly linked to West African countries — Nigeria, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana — have been mass-following real Swedish users who discuss politics. The profiles often use Swedish names and stolen photographs, while their geolocation points to Africa. Many of them publish almost no original content and instead simply accumulate follows.
Researchers warn that this infrastructure can be used to artificially amplify certain topics in users’ feeds and create the illusion of broad public support. Experts say the network can influence which political stories gain visibility in the platform’s recommendations and distort the picture of the debate. The fake accounts most often follow users on the right of the political spectrum, though examples on the left have also been found.
The same infrastructure had already been documented during election campaigns in the Netherlands in autumn 2025 and in Hungary in spring 2026. Analysts describe it as a reusable “guns-for-hire” network of coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB) that can be redirected from one European election to another. In the Swedish segment of X, researchers found thousands of accounts with the characteristic markers of this network.
Experts who reviewed the material compare the operators to mercenaries assembling large armies of accounts. Some analysts suggest that outside clients, including ones linked to Russian money, may stand behind the activity, but the published report does not make a direct attribution. Separately, Swedish authorities had earlier reported other bot networks on X, including the so-called Holiday network.
