Gang criminals openly advertise "jobs" online. The work? Carrying out explosions and murders for payment.
The new law coming into force today requires such adverts to be taken down by the relevant online platforms immediately, at the request of the police.
"The police have had no clear legal support to demand that they be taken down, that is the support we want to create," Gunnar Strömmer, Sweden's justice minister, said, explaining that the law would give Swedish authorities "powerful financial muscles" to pressure online platforms to take down the adverts.
Gang crime adverts often look like regular job ads and appear in chat channels on large platforms. They can be about everything from throwing a hand grenade to shooting someone to death.
The new law coming into force on Wednesday July 15th means that the police can demand that online platforms take down the adverts as quickly as possible – within an hour at the latest.
If this is not done in time, the companies risk fines of up to five million kronor, depending on the severity of the violation.
"It's everything from carelessness to someone very consciously and methodically looking the other way while the gangs recruit," said Strömmer.
With the law, Sweden will be the first in the EU to use legislation aimed at gangs that is similar to the removal of recruitment material for terrorism.
Gang criminals use, among other channels, Tiktok and Snapchat, and then redirect the calls to encrypted services such as Signal, wrote Diana Qudhaib, press spokesperson for the police's national operational department (Noa), to Swedish newswire TT.
Larger chat groups that were previously used by gang recruiters have been replaced with smaller ones – and, in several cases, existing groups, where computer games or football are discussed, have been used by the gangs.
“This is problematic, especially since there is a complete lack of cooperation from Signal, which is the most common encrypted messaging service used in these contexts,” Qudhaib wrote to TT.
At the same time, the police have a close relationship with many of the tech companies, and the vast majority want to do more and cooperate with the police to protect children, according to Qudhaib. However, authorities believe that the companies should do more to “act proactively and self-clean their platforms from this type of content,” Qudhaib wrote.