Navigating Noise
How to Fill an Information Vacuum Before Your Enemy Does with Kristian Ljungberg
On February 4, 2025, ten people were murdered at a school in Örebro, the deadliest mass shooting in Sweden's history. Then came a silence that the internet filled for days. Kristian Ljungberg holds national responsibility for how the Swedish Police communicate on days like that, and his read on what went wrong is not what you'd expect from a serving official: the first error was a decision on an org chart. The agency treated a national trauma as a regional incident, which meant no national chain of command and nobody authorized to speak for the country while rumor took the field. Before the police, Kristian ran crisis communication at the Forsmark and Ringhals nuclear plants and in healthcare. Three industries, one problem: what you say in the first minutes when people are terrified and the facts aren't in. He co-wrote Sweden's 2026 national guideline on joint communication during hybrid incidents, which makes him one of the few people who has actually written down how a democracy should talk to its citizens while under attack. Jonathan Teubner sits down with him on the sidelines of the Riga StratCom Dialogue for a conversation about the trade-off at the center of the job: getting it right versus getting it out, and what happens to a country when the silence becomes the battlefield. In this episode: Why the "golden hour" of crisis communication is now, in his words, five minutes How the Swedish Police published their first message on the 2017 Stockholm terror attack in three minutes The one time Kristian deliberately made a story harder to understand, and sent reporters an 800-page Interpol protocol What actually happened inside the Örebro information vacuum, and the decision he calls a strategic mistake Why the police eventually released footage from inside the school, blood on the floor, and why the criticism stopped after they did How he tells scared people getting it wrong apart from a deliberate influence operation, and why the response is nearly identical What Sweden means by "vaccinating" a population against disinformation, and why he thinks a skeptical public is a healthy one Subscribe to Navigating Noise for new episodes on how the world's most critical decisions get made, and what happens when the information behind them breaks down. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. More on Filter Labs: filterlabs.ai
