Social media recently got flooded with a very strange claim that Sweden had declared sex a sport and was organizing a tournament.
One person who shared the claim was Liberian media practitioner Patrick Honnah who used his Facebook, writing:
“So, Sweden has made Sex as a sport. The first competition will be held in Gothenburg on June 8. Other countries in Europe will be in the competition. Well, isn’t it a sport here already?”
Also, some local media in Liberia reported on this bizarre claim as was done by some international media.
The competition was apparently scheduled to begin June 8 in the city of Gothenburg.
The Local Voices Liberia IiVerify team checked the claim which was already being fact checked by other international fact checking organizations and concluded that it is false.
To arrive at this, we reviewed a press release from the Sweden Sports Confederation on an application from a group calling itself “The Swedish Sex Federation” to be considered a sport in the country.
According to the Press Release, that application was denied, contrary to claims shared online that the country has declared it would hold championships for sex.
A Swedish publication, Goteborgs-Posten reported on April 26, 2023, that Dragan Bratic, a man who formed “The Swedish Sex Federation,” submitted an application for the organization to become a part of the RF in January 2023. The application, however, was rejected by the RF, according to an April 26, 2023 press release.
However, the Swedish sports body denied the existence of any such event in a release, noting that its “attention has been drawn to the fact that in some parts of the international media, the news is currently being spread that a Sex federation has become a member of The Swedish Sports Confederation, this information is false and has the aim of smearing Swedish sports and Sweden,” the release noted.
Therefore, we conclude that the claim that “Sweden has made Sex as a sport. The first competition will be held in Gothenburg on June 8.” is misleading.
Local Voices Liberia, in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme, has implemented the iVerify Liberia system with the objective of strengthening capacities to address threats to information integrity, especially in view of the upcoming 2023 elections, to ensure all Liberian citizens have access to credible, reliable and verified information, everywhere and at all times.
This initiative is funded by Irish Aid, Embassy of Sweden in Monrovia, European Union Delegation in Liberia and the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund. The donors have no say in the production of this fact check report.
