On the 16th of December 2024, the Italian news site Quotidiano Nazionale published an article about Sweden. “The Nightmare of a Russian Attack. Sweden thinks of its soldiers: Preparing 30,000 graves”, the headline reads. Their source: the newspaper The Nordic Times, reporting on Sweden’s crisis preparedness.
A month earlier, Sweden’s preparedness policy had made headlines across Europe, against the backdrop of the face of the Nordic region’s vulnerability to Russia’s threat to European security. Swedish media reported that the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency and the Swedish Armed Forces had declared the need for 30,000 graves in the city of Gothenburg, as part of the country's crisis preparedness. A number of international media reported it, many of them citing “the Swedish newspaper The Nordic Times”.
The article, now translated to english, was first published in Expo #3-2025
TNT describes itself as “the first completely independent international newspaper in English that is based in the Nordic countries”. On its website, international readers can see that the outlet is a part of the Aeon Media Group, described as the Nordic region’s leading media group for independent media. What remains unclear to readers is that the Aeon Media Group owns only one other outlet – Swedish newspaper Nya Dagbladet.
The media company is led by Markus Andersson and Isac Boman. Andersson is the Editor-in-chief and Publisher of Nya Dagbladet, while Boman acts as News Editor. Anderson has previously been involved in the Swedish far-right nationalist party, The National Democrats, and Nya Dagbladet is known for spreading conspiracy theories and publishing racist content.
The news outlet was founded in 2012 by Andersson, who played a leading role in the now-defunct National Democrats. In 2008, he was the driving force behind the nationalist campaign “Aktion för Sverige” (Action for Sweden, in English).
Nya Dagbladet, like the two nationalist organizations Andersson was involved in, has declared itself ethnopluralist, an ideology that defends the separation of ethnic groups. Nya Dagbladets ethnopluralist statement was, however, deleted, after several media, including Expo, reported on it.
On its website, Nya Dagbladet publishes far-right conspiracy theories such as “great replacement”, Holocaust skepticism (by questioning the number of victims during the Holocaust), and articles about a supposed Muslim takeover of Europe. During the pandemic, the publication also spread misinformation about Covid-19. In fact, the newspaper played an essential role in organizing the so-called corona protests in Sweden.
Expo has also reported on their participation in a trip to China, funded by the Chinese regime. There, Nya Dagbladet’s leading duo met with representatives of the dictatorship and later published favourable pieces about the regime. In June this year, The Nordic Times featured an op-ed by China’s ambassador to Sweden, about China’s desire to strengthen its friendship with the Scandinavian nation. The embassy then wrote on its website that Ambassador Cui Aimin had been featured in “Swedish media”.
When Nya Dagbladet’s application for media state support was rejected by the Swedish Agency for the Media in 2020, the newspaper reacted strongly and published articles featuring the names and pictures of individual case officers, creating fear and concern among the agency’s employees.
The website has even publicly supported nazis. During the campaign for the 2022 Swedish general election, Per Nordin, listed as an editor at Nya Dagbladet until 2023, argued that “nationalist voters” should support the nazi organization Nordic Resistance Movement instead of the ethnonationalist party Alternative for Sweden. In the article, the nazi organization’s programme is described as clearer when it comes to the “survival of the Nordic people” and its stance on the issue of “Jewish interest groups”, which Nordin describes as “the strongest driving force behind the transformation of Western societies into multicultural and multiethnic societies.”
the news articles are usually anonymous and authored by “Editorial Staff”
Many of those who now write for Nya Dagbladet also contribute to The Nordic Times. TNT’s columnists sign their texts, while the news articles are usually anonymous and authored by “Editorial Staff”. However, in the website’s metadata, several of the names linked to its user IDs also have access to Nya Dagbladet’s website.
A look at the layout of both homepages strengthens the argument for calling TNT an English version of Nya Dagbladet. A comparison of several randomly selected dates shows that the homepages feature the same top articles, in Swedish at Nya Dagbladet and in English at TNT. In fact, a majority TNT’s articles are direct translation of its Swedish-language counterpart and vice-versa.
Despite the similarities, TNT and Nya Dagbladet never refer to each other in their social media pages. On TNT’s website, a search for “Nya Dagbladet” returns only a few results, most of which cites the newspaper as a source without ever mentioning the connection between the two titles. In some cases, articles are republications of Nya Dagbladet pieces, with a brief reference to that fact at the end of the text.
Markus Andersson’s role as founder and publisher at Nya Dagbladet is well-known in Sweden. But on The Nordic Times’ website it is Per Andersson who is named as publisher. Expo could not find that name mentioned in any official documents linked to the company that owns the titles, nor in any signed articles or in the metadata of the two websites. What TNT’s metadata mentions is user ID “Markus Andersson”, who is also president of Aeon Media and the tech company Ideal Vision AB (which owns Aeon). Moreover, Markus Andersson is registered as president of the Nya Dagbladet Foundation, renamed Nordic Independent Media Foundation in December 2023.
Markus Andersson’s official name on Sweden’s population register is Per Markus Andersson. And it is under his full name that the Chinese website Global Times refers to him as the “editor” of TNT in September 2024.
The Nordic Times presents itself internationally as the “only independent” English-language newspaper in the Nordics and builds its raison d'être on portraying the Swedish media landscape and journalism as tendentious and corrupt.
On the website of the Nordic Independent Media Foundation, it states that “in the Western world, and the Nordic countries in particular, the media climate has been deteriorating over a long period of time. The situation is now such that a small number of media conglomerates control virtually the entire landscape. [...] This has had a severely negative impact not only on citizens’ access to free and vital information, but also on national democratic processes which have been eroded to an alarming degree.”
Mathilda Åkerlund, a postdoctoral researcher in journalism, media, and communication at the University of Gothenburg, believes that it would be disadvantageous to openly acknowledge the connection between Nya Dagbladet and TNT, leading to it being deliberately withheld:
– There is a reason not to show that connection. Nya Dagbladet’s editor-in-chief has been a central figure in National Democrats, an ideologically racist organization. So if one wants to start anew and convince editors around Europe, one might not want that connection clearly stated, she says.
Apart from a few titles like The Local Sweden and Radio Sweden (English language news within Sweden’s public radio broadcaster), there is little English-language news production in Sweden. For international media wanting to report on the Nordic region, TNT comes up as a free and accessible news source.
The Gothenburg graves story wasn’t the first time TNT was quoted by international media. Expo’s research shows that the title has been used as a news source by international media more than 15 times since it was founded in 2022. But it was in November last year that it was cited the most, particularly in Italy. Several established Italian publications and a news agency included information and quotes from The Nordic Times’ article about the graves.
In August 2024, TNT published an article describing Sweden as the most multicultural country in the West. Australian journalist Grant Wyeth used that text as the basis for an article about native language instruction in the Swedish education system, in a comparative analysis with Australia. He says he easily identified the conservative tendency of the website’s columnists, but could not detect its connection to Sweden’s far-right ecosystem.
– Since my Swedish isn’t good enough to read Swedish newspapers, I look for English-language sources. That’s how I found The Nordic Times, as a website where I could get an idea about what’s happening in the country, he says.
International media outlets have also referenced TNT’s articles on topics that circulate widely within the far-right echo chamber. In January this year, in an article about the high number of explosions in Sweden, the renowned European news platform Euractiv cites both The Nordic Times and global news agency Reuters, side by side as equally credible sources.
– It is clear that they see an opportunity in the existing demand [for news in English]; there’s an untapped market. They see a chance to publish news in English, says Mathilda Åkerlund, who has conducted research on the radical right’s online discourse.
Having a mix of topics and publishing “neutral” news alongside more politically biased news is not uncommon on platforms that want to spread far-right narratives, the researcher emphasizes.
– It’s not that they necessarily write something false or that they lie. That’s an important factor in building legitimacy and trustworthiness.
– But over time, by publishing more and more news, it becomes clear that they write from a very specific perspective and creates a distorted picture of society, of what criminality looks like, of what societal problems look like, she says.
Just like its Swedish counterpart, TNT offers a mix of daily news and ideologically far-right opinion pieces and analysis.
One aspect that stand out and points to The Nordic Times’ ideology is the website’s news categories. Among these are “The Exaggerated Climate Crisis”, “The Globalist Agenda”, and “Totalitarianism”, which include articles on Sweden’s government measures to handle emergency situations or EU sanctions against Hungary for its treatment of LGBTQ+ people. The newspaper’s health section features categories such as “The Criticized COVID Vaccinations” and “The COVID Repression”.
In the culture section, readers can find articles about the “Cultural Revolution in the West”, namely through critical articles about a so-called “gender war” and a trans woman nominated for a women’s prize.
The website also reports on the white nationalist and far-right conspiracy theory of “population replacement”. These news articles mention “decades of unrestricted mass immigration” and “ethnic enclaves dominated by people of non-European background,” as well as critical reporting on multiculturalism.
“The source was The Nordic Times, an independent news site founded two years ago, with English-language coverage of all Scandinavian countries,” writes the Italian newspaper Il Sussidiario in its article about the plans for 30,000 graves in Gothenburg. Mathilda Åkerlund points out that the more TNT appears in international established media, the greater the chance that others will find and use the site as a legitimate source.
– So far it may have been pieces that don't necessarily lean to the far-right, things that in their mix of news are a little more neutral. But next time, it might be something angled differently. And if a legitimate source has quoted them, even if it's about something completely different, readers enter the website and comes across other kinds of news, because several media have already legitimized this source, she says.
TNT's political leaning is not obvious to those unfamiliar with Nya Dagbladet and Markus Andersson. And for an international audience, the connection between the two newspapers is difficult to detect.
In January 2023, after Expo reported on internationally renowned AI researcher Max Tegmark's plans to fund Nya Dagbladet, American computer scientist Rachel Adjogah published her own findings on the platform Medium. There, she pointed out Nya Dagbladets connection to The Nordic Times and described how Newsweek, an established American publication, had used TNT as a source for an article about the documentary “The History of Sweden”, by Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT.
Newsweek reported that a “Swedish History TV series faces backlash for using black actors”. In addition to citing TNT, the magazine also included a tweet by Jeff Ahl, a member of the ethnonationalist party Alternative for Sweden and former MP for the far-right Sweden Democrats, currently a supporting party of the right-wing Swedish government.
Newsweek is one of the three largest weekly magazines in the US and is known for being politically liberal. Rachel Adjogah, who has an academic background in machine learning and a particular interest in the intersection of technology and the far-right, was critical of The Nordic Times being featured by the established weekly magazine. She questioned whether they really were unaware of their connection to the Swedish far-right.
But even though it is easier for those who speak Swedish to find the parallels, Mathilda Åkerlund believes that the connection is deliberately unclear:
– It would have been possible to make it very clear, by writing: “To see an English version, click here” or “to see a Swedish version, click here,” she says.
According to the researcher, the motives behind TNT's activities are ideological in nature, but adds that targeting a broader international audience could also bring financial benefits.
TNT states that their work is “reader-funded through donations and advertising”. In public documents linked to an ongoing legal dispute between Nya Dagbladet and its bank, which has closed the newspapers accounts citing a lack of customer information and high risk account activity, it appears that Aeon Media AB received foreign payments totaling just over two million Swedish kronor in 2021 and 2022. The site also advertises the IT company Teuton Systems, another of Markus Andersson's and Isac Boman's businesses.
It is clear that the same people run both The Nordic Times, Nya Dagbladet, and Teuton Systems. But it remains unclear which role TNT plays in Nya Dagbladet's financial and political strategy.
Despite several emails and phone calls, Expo was unable to get a response to our questions. In a phone call, Markus Andersson did not want to elaborate on TNT but said they would get back to us via email. After repeated questions about the collaboration between the two news sites, the purpose of TNT, and whether Per Andersson is in fact Nya Dagbladet's Markus Andersson, TNT finally emailed a response. Since the questions concerned a publication for “the left-wing extremist intelligence group Expo", they would not comment. The email was signed “Editorial staff”.
Translated by Rita Cruz och Justin Yarga
