Sveriges Television (SVT) is Sweden's national public service broadcaster, reaching roughly 80% of the population every week across television, streaming and digital news. As Sweden's most-trusted news source, SVT operates under a statutory public service mandate and has a defined role in the country's total defence during national crises (SOURCE).
Factiverse is working with SVT and contributing to their mission.
In Anders' (SVT Editor) own words:
"We use Factiverse AI to systematically monitor and analyse news flows on platforms such as YouTube. This enables us to review political parties ahead of the election in a structured, consistent and data-driven way. " — Anders Kauranen, Editor SVT Research, SVT Nyheter Riks
The challenge
Election cycles are among the busiest in any European newsroom. Editors rewatch TV debates, sift through political podcasts, and scroll TikTok and YouTube hunting for the one claim that could shift the national conversation. In the last decade, the surface area has multiplied, especially in Sweden, Europe’s most digitally advanced media markets: 52% of Swedes aged 9 to 85 used YouTube daily, while 46% watched linear TV. Source https://www.nordiskpost.com/2026/05/11/youtube-in-sweden-has-overtaken-linear-tv/
YouTube has become the dominant platform for long-form political content. Populist, conservative and far-right voices increasingly set the agenda for broadcast journalists trying to keep up.
The volume on YouTube is the breaking point globally:
- 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day, generating 720,000 hours of new content (SOURCE)
- 1-3% of that glocal content is “news and politics”. During the elections, the number of videos on news and politics increases significantly (SOURCE)
In Sweden:
Sweden's creators upload between 3.3 and 4.4 million new videos to YouTube every year.
- In a baseline year, roughly 2% of this content is dedicated to news and politics. However, during critical election cycles, that figure spikes to 5%.
- Because political commentary and coverage trend toward comprehensive formats, this volume translates to over 17,500 hours of new political content in a standard year, surging to more than 43,000 hours during an election cycle.
For perspective, this creates an unmanageable firehose of information: media teams cannot sift through roughly 48 hours of new footage every day, and up to 120 hours per day when voters head to the polls. No newsroom in Europe has the bandwidth to watch all of it.
Watching that manually requires 28 full-time journalists in a baseline year, and up to 69 during a contested election cycle. No newsroom in Sweden has that capacity, and neither is in Europe. It results in newsrooms lacking resources to detect critical information on platforms like YouTube.
Factiverse team consists of journalists and writers themselves. And of course, there is no need for a journalist to watch all 120 hours of political video uploaded to YouTube per day during an election.
But your competitor might. And the consequence of missing it is not only fresh story ideas left on the table — it is also losing the ability to protect the public from harmful false claims as they spread. That is the challenge European media is now operating with, and SVT is taking charge to solve.
The solution
SVT is working with Factiverse to extend its editorial coverage into the parts of the information environment that no newsroom has the bandwidth to monitor manually. Three capabilities work together.
1. Gather — the morning briefing for what your team did not have bandwidth to watch. SVT editors configure monitoring across the YouTube channels and political accounts relevant to their beats. Every morning, the editorial team receives a single readable summary of the most editorially significant claims circulating overnight. Some editors instead opt for instant reports when a new video is published on a channel they watch.
The result:
- a 120-hour daily coverage gap closed by one editor and one summary
- New stories surfaced before competitors find them.
- No more FOMO about what is moving in the corners of the internet.
2. Live analysis of the upcoming key election debates — verification in minutes. Real-time claim flagging during contested live coverage. Journalists verify claims as events unfold instead of scrambling afterwards.
The result:
- Hours of post-debate fact-checking are eliminated from every debate.
- Misinformation publicly corrected while it still matters, not the day after.
3. The searchable archive — every claim, every source, every narrative, retrievable. Every video processed becomes a structured record in the Factiverse database. Searchable by claim, by speaker, by topic, by date. A reporter chasing a story two months from now can pull every previous statement a political figure has made on a topic — across hundreds of YouTube appearances, podcast interviews, and live broadcasts — in seconds.
The result:
- Institutional memory at the speed of search.
- A claim made on a fringe channel in February becomes evidence in a national story in May.
- The database is the asset.
4. Workflow integration — Slack, email, dashboard. The summary of each video, whether from external monitoring or SVT's own programmes, arrives at the point where editorial work already happens.
The result:
- Blindspot closed without changing the workflow, saving journalists precious time for actual reporting.
The moment that proved It
One morning, one of the editors read the Gather summary in which we flagged a fabricated allegation from a far-right Swedish YouTube channel with a substantial following, containing violence and misinformation.
SVT's editorial team reviewed the email report, examined the summary and claims, and decided to monitor if similar claims appeared in other channels. This is to determine whether they are part of a larger narrative campaign. Tracking these narratives can help identify the coordinated spread of a single story across the Swedish information environment and demonstrates to the audience how disinformation propagates.
That story would not have existed in a manual-monitoring world. The fringe video would have either been missed entirely or covered as a one-off, potentially spreading further and causing damage in the public debate.
.jpg)
Who should read this twice
If you lead editorial or strategy at a public service broadcaster, or an election-integrity authority — Sweden's choice is your roadmap. The next contested election in your country is closer than your current capacity allows.
.avif)
