Article about mandatory Ramadan celebration in Swedish schools is fake

By: Christian Haag
March 20 2024

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Fake screenshot of article from Dagens Nyheter that has gone viral. (Source:X/Screenshot/Edited by Logically Facts)

Context

On March 19, 2024, an X (formerly Twitter) account posted a screenshot of a fake article claiming to be from the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter headlined “Motion: Introduce mandatory celebration of Ramadan in municipal schools.”

The screenshot claims that Swedish Social Democratic politician Morgan Johansson has written a motion that would force pupils to celebrate Ramadan. It details that students would receive a lower grade in the subject of religion if they did not participate and that parents must take responsibility for teaching their children about Islam. 

The X post has garnered over 100,000 views at the time of writing. A large number of users have believed the screenshot, responding with inflammatory comments about Morgan Johansson, the Social Democrats, and Muslims.

However, the article is fake, and Dagens Nyheter has not published any such article. 

In fact

The image contains a watermark of an X account, which our research shows is the first instance of the screenshot being shared online. Other discrepancies include the picture having no description or attribution to the photographer, which is usually present in articles from Dagens Nyheter. 

Screenshot of the fake article with the creator's X account highlighted in red. 
(Source: X/Screenshot/Markup by Logically Facts)

Searching for the article headline on Dagens Nyheter yields no results. Similarly, there is no result for the alleged motion on the database for documents and laws on the Swedish Riksdag website. When searching for “Ramadan," 19 motions appear in the search result, but none of them were written by Morgan Johansson.

Logically Facts contacted Morgan Johansson, who denied the existence of the motion, commenting that it is “a pure fabrication. There is no such motion and never has been. Nor have I ever expressed an opinion on the matter."

Logically Facts has contacted Dagens Nyheter for comment. 

The account has previously posted fake satirical articles posing as several different Swedish newspapers. However, this one has been perceived as true by a large amount of people on X.

The verdict

The article is fake and was not published by Dagens Nyheter. Morgan Johansson has confirmed to Logically Facts that he has not presented any such motion. Therefore we have marked this claim as fake.