Table of contents

Chapter One - Some Background

Chapter Two - The Storm before the Calm before the Storm

Chapter One - Some Background

So this is the story of the covid-19 pandemic on Twitter, as it happened to me. It was the worst of times, but in some weird respects also the best of times. Crazy as some of this will sound, it all happened. But let’s back up the tape a little. I’ll *try* not to bore you by going into too much detail, but there are a few things I feel the reader should know, which might explain, at least to a certain extent, why things panned out the way they did.

Firstly, let me introduce myself. My name is Anders Dalström. I’m from Timrå, a small town on the coast, about 400 km north of Stockholm. I’m currently a freelance translator, but I originally studied to become a teacher of English and Swedish for the upper secondary school. Although I only hacked the job for four years in the early 2000s, I still feel I haven’t fully recovered from the occupational injury of always having to be reasonable and sensible (or at least try); as a teacher, tempting as it sometimes is, you can’t respond in kind to students when they say something inappropriate, which during those four years happened quite frequently, for example, the discussion about immigrants and immigration was a hot topic in the schools I worked in long before the Sweden Democrats made their breakthrough into mainstream politics - the opinions voiced and the words used by some of my students were far from politically correct.

I think that’s why I rather enjoyed (past tense) Twitter – here was the chance to tell an idiot in no uncertain terms that he’s an idiot. Add to that the character restrictions and you have a medium where you can get creative while at the same time you have to think about economy of expression – in short, a perfect combination for a language nerd freed from the shackles of having to act like a teacher.

I believe I set up my first Twitter profile in 2012 or so, mainly as a way to follow my hockey team, Timrå IK, from abroad (I lived in Dublin between 2006 and 2013 and in Berlin from 2013 until the 20^th of March 2020). Soon I discovered that there was a lot more than hockey going on in the world of Twitter. In those early days, at least as far as I remember, there was an innocence about nearly everything – apart from hockey, stupid jokes and good-natured banter dominated my feed. This is almost certainly a rose-tinted view in the rearview mirror, but I stand by my belief that Twitter was a more civil place before 2015 and Donald Trump announcing his presidential candidacy (I remember laughing at the footage of him looking stupid going down that stupid escalator, and saying to myself that he didn’t stand a chance in hell of ever being even nominated by the Republican party. [insert monkey covering face emoji]. At least I wasn’t alone in being spectacularly wrong...)

(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48595411)

Somehow, I slowly got sucked into all sorts of stupid political debates, for example with right wing people in Sweden. I once retweeted Hanif Bali, a politician from the Swedish right of centre party, The Moderates, who himself is anything but, and made some comment about how outrageous his point was. The only problem was that I had completely misinterpreted his tweet and accused him of encouraging violence, when in fact he had said the complete opposite. I believe this happened at a weekend and as I was out and about my pants suddenly started vibrating incessantly – Bali had retweeted me saying how unfair it was that he was being attacked and now his most vocal fans (Bali currently has more than 240k followers, I’m not sure how many he had back then, but he has always made his social media presence a bigger priority than contributing to Swedish democracy while he was a member of parliament, so it was still a sizeable number.) were telling me what a fucking idiot I was. And they were absolutely correct, I had been too quick in my assumption that Bali had said something idiotic, which is what I normally think of his opinions (I never see his stupid opinions these days because he blocked me after I called him an ignorant bastard in December 2022...).

Interestingly enough, the tweet in which I apologised for having misunderstood him was completely ignored by both Bali and his scores of fans.

For several years I took part in unbelievably inane “discussions” on Twitter, often on a daily basis. To think of the time I wasted on trying to explain to MAGA fans why the second amendment is obsolete or getting triggered by people spouting nonsense or lies about immigrants. I mean, why did I even bother? What’s worse, it affected my mood negatively and after a particularly stupid exchange of insults I would be irritable and short-tempered. It still wasn’t until 2019 that I deleted my Twitter profile (there might still be some relics of @pandatransl out there). I created a new account in August the same year, with the sole purpose of following accounts connected to ice hockey. And then the pandemic hit…

Before we get to the events of early 2020, there’s one more thing I feel should be added as background information: In my youth I was a lazy student with a bit of an attitude problem. I’d always been an avid reader, but it wasn’t until I was at university that “the penny dropped” and I properly started taking an interest in learning, mainly thanks to our inspiring lecturers. I can still nearly 30 years later remember how mind-blowing (and refreshing) I found it to listen to these knowledgeable people who without hesitation would answer questions with “I don’t know”; they were evidently confident enough in their knowledge that they didn’t mind admitting that. I realised that if you really want to learn something or get to the truth, you need to be honest about what you know, what you believe you know and what you clearly don’t know.

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