Janne Korhonen i en twittertråd:
A short explainer to the "scandal" of Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin partying, for those who don't read Finnish.
1. Someone had leaked a video of Marin dancing with her friends.
2.
A known neo-nazi and the Finnish equivalent of 4chan anonymous message board began to speculate that the participants in the video were on drugs. Their evidence: they thought someone on the video talked about "flour gang", which these trolls interpreted to mean drugs.
3. It is worth noting that police officers, crime reporters with 20+ years of experience, and researchers who have actually studied Finnish drug culture all say that the word for "flour" (jauho) isn't used to refer to drugs. Also, the audio quality is very poor.
4.
The trolls from the anonymous message board - a hotbed of misogynism and far right trolling - began to drum up the "controversy." A known pro-Putin conspiracy theorist picked up the neo-nazi tweets and amplified them.
5. Large segments of Finnish media jumped on the bandwagon. So far, their key pieces of evidence are
a) a journalist insinuating that lack of bottles in the short video means that the participants must be on drugs
b) an anonymous "acoustics expert"
6. Note that this conveniently anonymous expert says that someone in the audio is talking about "flour", which the police, crime journalists and actual researchers say isn't used to refer to drugs in Finnish drug culture.
7. Extra irony points accrue from the fact that many people who now criticize Marin steadfastly defended a conservative member of parliament who just some weeks ago was accused by nine separate individuals to have been grooming underage girls and plying them with alcohol.
8. In short, this is probably the dumbest scandal I've seen, and I've seen some pretty fucking dumb one