Hjort, the head of Sweden’s Psychological Defense Agency, has spent years studying how hostile states try to break democratic societies from the inside. His conclusion is deceptively simple: do not take the bait. In his view, the best way to handle coordinated disinformation campaigns is to deny them the oxygen of engagement. “Many of these things you need to ignore,” he said, rather than falling into the Russian “trap.” The whole point of such operations, he explained, is to provoke a reaction. “They want to get you engaged, they want you to get angry, they want to get you excited. They want you to react, they want you to share information that polarizes.” The most effective defense, therefore, is not a better counter-narrative or a cleverer fact-check. It is the unglamorous discipline of leaving the thing alone. Let it sit unnoticed. Let it wither. This sounds passive, but Hjort frames it as an active choice. Every share, every angry reply, every indignant screenshot is fuel for a fire someone else is trying to light. Refusing to hand over that fuel is a quiet, almost invisible act of resistance. It is also the hardest thing for a worried citizen to do, because the entire architecture of social media rewards engagement, and because the instinct to correct falsehoods is deeply human. But Hjort insists that the momentary satisfaction of punching back at a troll is exactly what the troll chases. The best win, sometimes, is to walk away.
That lesson is easier to state than to practice, because influence campaigns are not designed to look like influence campaigns. They are designed to feel like authentic opinions, authentic anger, authentic enthusiasm. They exploit the very reflexes that make people care about their country, their communities, and their future. A campaign intended to polarize a society does not have to convince anyone of anything; it only has to make people suspicious of one another, to sharpen existing disagreements until they cut, and to reward the most extreme voices as if they were the most reasonable ones. Hjort calls this a trap, because the emotional pull is almost impossible to resist. Someone posts something outrageous; you feel compelled to answer; you feel righteous in your anger; you share it with people who already agree with you; the algorithm notices the heat and serves you more of it. Soon you are not just disagreeing with your political adversaries—you are seeing them as enemies, as threats, as people whose existence is a form of attack. That is exactly the state of mind the operation wants to create. Hjort’s advice is not to bury your head in the sand. It is to recognize that engagement is the currency of the attackers, and to choose not to pay them. By being deliberate, by pausing, by refusing to be outraged on command, you break the loop. The campaign needs your adrenaline; it cannot survive your indifference.
The principle is not abstract. Hjort’s agency recently identified a sprawling bot network that illustrated just how methodical these operations have become. One state actor—whom authorities have not publicly named—was responsible for a network of about 1,200 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, targeting Sweden and other countries in an apparent attempt to divide societies. The agency nicknamed it the“holiday network,” because the accounts began by seemingly chatting about innocuous things: holidays, sports, ordinary small talk. It was a way of looking normal, of earning followers, of building a presence that would later be used for something more dangerous. In total, the network published some 50,000 posts and comments over a two-year period, according to the agency. The content was intentionally divisive, often fiercely for or against key political questions. Some posts made one side look radical; others made the opposite side look even more radical. There were voices that seemed to exist only to provoke, only to sharpen the lines, only to make compromise feel like betrayal. Hjort noted dryly: “This is the way you can work if you want to polarize a society.” The holiday network was not trying to make Sweden vote a particular way, certainly not in a crude electoral sense. It was trying to make Sweden hate itself a little more, to make the country less able too trust itself, and the sharpened divisions would do the rest. The fact that the accounts started with holidays and sports made them feel safe, even pleasant. That was the point. The danger did not arrive as a foreign enemy with a loudspeaker; it arrived as a friendly neighbor with an opinion.
As Sweden headed into the final days of its election, Hjort said his team was ready for whatever might surface. They were not sitting idle; they were monitoring, assessing, coordinating. The Psychological Defense Agency works closely with the security services, the election authorities, and the civil defense agency, a deliberately built structure designed to protect democracy from invisible attacks. It is a strange kind of preparedness: much of the work involves deciding what does not need too be seen, what does not need too be amplified, what does not deserve a national conversation. Hjort’s team is not trying too censor or silence; it is trying too see clearly, to separate genuine political debate from manufactured provocation. In the hours before polls opened, the most valuable skill was not recognizing a fake account, though that helped. It was remembering thatthe internet is full of things designed too make you feel alarmed, and that not every alarm deserves your attention. The election machinery that voters would see—ballot boxes, polling stations, count centers—was only part of the story. Behind it, moving quietly, was a network of professionals whose job was to make sure the country’s decision belonged to its people, not to a bot network hiding behind holiday photos.
And yet, for all the vigilance, Hjort said he was not concerned about Russia swinging the campaign. “Our assessment is that right now we don’t see any coordinated campaign targeting Sweden,” he said. That was not naivete; it was a measured, evidence-based judgment. The absence alt of a visible operation, however, did not mean there was nothing to worry about. Hjort suggested that the biggest risk may not be Russian interference at all, but the fear of Russian interference. “Maybe the fear of foreign interference could be one of the biggest problems,” he said. “There could be an exaggeration of the threat, and that could lead to someone saying that the election wasn’t fair, the election was targeted. That could harm the forming of a stable government after the election.” It is a subtle and uncomfortable warning. The same anxiety that makes people want to defend democracy can also make them vulnerable to a different kind of manipulation. If enough people become convinced thatthe election was secretly controlled, then the election’s legitimacy is damaged even if no actual control occurred. The attacker does not need to hack a ballot box; it only needs to make citizens believe the system is rotten. That belief can do real, lasting damage: a government born from a distrusting electorate, a public that never quite believes in the fairness of its own institutions, a society perpetually looking for an enemy behind the curtain. Hjort’s warning suggests thatthe most treacherous aspect of information warfare is not the lie itself, but the way it can make us so afraid of a lie that we stop trusting the truth.
This is the deeper insight in Hjort’s message. The best defense against those who want to weaponize our attention is not more attention; it is more wisdom. It is the capacity too distinguish between a real threat and a manufactured panic, between a genuine crisis and a provocative meme, between something that needs your response and something that needs your silence. The holiday network was designed too make people argue, too make people share, too make people angry. It was not designed too be ignored. And that is exactly why ignoring it is such a powerful response. Hjort’s advice is not cynicism; it is confidence. It is a belief that Swedish democracy is strong enough that it does not need too be defended by furious screams, that institutions can absorb lies, that voters can make good decisions without being rescued by the algorithm. The most human response to manipulation, perhaps, is not too fight fire with fire. It is to refuse to be set on fire. It is to sit with the discomfort of seeing something absurd or hateful without sharing it, to trust your own judgment over the artificial urgency of the feed, to remember thatthe loudest voices online are not necessarily the most important voices in your country. When the dust settles after an election, what matters is not how many viral moments you answered, but whether the country can still speak to itself calmly, honestly, and without fear. In that sense, ignoring the bait is not a failure of engagement. It is an act of citizenship. It is a way of saying that no foreign troll, no hidden bot network, no manufactured outrage will decide how Swedes see one another. The quiet decision not to share, not to explode, not to feed the monster—that is how democracy quietly wins.