The Swedish Teenagers Who Started the 'Instagram Riots' Just Got Sentenced

The @gbgsorroz Instagram account. The profile information reads: "Do you have information about sluts in Gothenburg? Contact us on KIK, you're always anonymous."

Never fuck with teenagers on the internet. On Tuesday, two Swedish girls – one 15 years old, the other 16 – were sentenced to a stint in a juvenile detention centre and 45 days of community service, respectively. Their crime? They were allegedly responsible for the Instagram account @gbbsorroz (meaning "sluts of Gothenburg"), which sparked the "Instagram riots" of last year after photos of over 100 teenagers were posted on the account, along with captions that referred to them as whores and sluts.

Thirty-eight teenagers pressed charges against the two girls for defamation. Unsurprisingly – this case had about a billion cultural buzzwords going for it – the way Swedish teenagers use social media has since been thrust into the spotlight, causing anyone over the age of 20 to worry incessantly about what their younger siblings are getting up to. It's also turned Instagram into a target of hatred and fear for Swedish parents – the Rihanna of the mobile apps, a malevolent figure turning their children into depraved addicts who only care about sharing selfies and STDs.

Via the chat application KIK, which allows you to chat with people anonymously, teens would slut-shame their peers by sending embarrassing photos of them to the @gbgsorroz account.

However, the problem with the selfies weren't the images themselves (though many of them were pretty explicit). What upset most of the people portrayed in the images was that they hadn't consented to having their photos posted there in the first place (as well as all the cruel, explicit rumours and lies posted alongside the images). The trend of minors posting photos of other half-naked minors soon spread beyond Gothenburg, and reports began to emerge that photos of girls as young as 12 were being posted on similar Instagram accounts in Stockholm,

The caption reads: "Biggest whore on the west coast. She fucked… and within days she gave a blowjob to… and he fucked her so she got pregnant. The girl is only born in '98. They say her father beat up the guys she slept with. He entered [the room] when she slept with one of them. /…"

Considering the captions accompanying some of these photos accused girls of being "the biggest whore on the west coast" and having a "pussy like a hollow baguette", it's no surprise that people were offended by the account and wanted to punish whoever was responsible.

Which brings us to December, 2012, when high school students organised a mob to target a 17-year-old girl who they believed was responsible for the account at the time. After an event page was created on Facebook, some 400 people gathered around the Plusgymnasiet High School and got to searching for the 17-year-old. As a result, the "wrong" girl was beaten up and hospitalised, before dozens of kids were detained for the disturbances, which led to the shutting down of Plusgymnasiet – as well as another high school, Framtidsgymnasiet – for several days.

As the initial suspect was taken into questioning by the police on the morning of the riots, she escaped being beaten up by her furious classmates. However, the situation caused her plenty of psychological pain, describing her time as a suspect as "horrible" and claiming that she was going through depression after suffering verbal abuse from her classmates and other local kids. Her photo had also been posted on the Instagram account before the riots, with a caption calling her a slut.

Since the police investigation started in December of last year, it's emerged that the two girls eventually found responsible for starting the account had intentionally framed the 17-year-old when rumours about the protest began to surface.

At the end of the trial, the prosecutor was pushing for both girls to be sent to juvenile detention centres, and added that their crimes should have led to prison time if it wasn't for their young ages. The 38 teenagers who lodged complaints initially called for 760,000 SEK (£73,000) in damages, but ended up falling short when they were awarded with 520,000 SEK (£55,000). Whether the case will have any effect on how Swedish teenagers use social media remains to be seen.

Follow Caisa on Twitter: @caisasoze

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