@Sweden goes off the rails

A social media experiment intended to bring tourism to Sweden backfired earlier this week, when a citizen Tweeter went rogue.

Earlier this year, Stockholm began handing over the reins to @sweden, the government’s official Twitter handle, to a different citizen each week.

When Sonja Abrahamsson took over—on the day the New York Times gave the project’s beautiful, idiosyncratic missives front-page coverage—she took it in an unforeseen direction.

“I seriously need to get some eggs before I starve like an African child” she Tweeted before moving on to religion: “Whats the fuzz with jews.” It got a lot worse from there (a photo of Freddy Mercury with strawberries captioned “hungry gay with aids,” the claim her life might be easier if she “had downs syndrome,” that Hitler, before WWII was a beautiful name and so on).

Abrahamsson, who claims to comes from a tiny town where everyone is related and owns a tractor, has since apologized.

“If there is anything to be learned from the @Sweden experiment,” the Times wrote, it is that there is no such thing as a typical Swede.” Indeed.