Erik Strand, 02.02.2026
There are plenty of examples of media, discussion groups and the like which do not want some parts of reality to be known. I will here cover one example of a post that was unwanted.
Kvinneguiden (“Women’s guide) is a well known online forum in Norway. One of the many topics at this forum is Actual cases and politics (“Aktuelle saker og politikk”). On January 13, 2026, a person calling himself “Reidar Tomb” started a thread in this section of Kvinneguiden. The topic was how the Norwegian online newspaper Nettavisen distorted a letter from a reader.
This is what Reidar Tomb wrote:
“Established Norwegian media with rotten behavior
Those who have followed more than just the established media over time have realized that not everything is as it should be with Norwegian mainstream media. Everything from concealments via factual errors of various kinds to narratives that give media consumers an incorrect picture of events is part of the agenda. A collection of articles that criticize Norwegian media in various ways can be found on the website of the organization Fampo.
Recently, however, the number of articles/comments that criticize Norwegian mainstream media has escalated. Whether this is because established media have behaved worse recently, or whether it is because someone has become better at reporting on it, remains to be seen. I will illustrate this with two groups of examples.
The first group of examples concerns none other than our state channel. A collection of articles about NRK can be found here. Here, it should be enough to study, and the reader can judge for himself.
However, a particularly ugly case concerns Nettavisen. You can see what is involved by reading the three most recent articles in this collection of comments related to Nettavisen. In short, Kjetil Tveit asked to have a response published to an article in Nettavisen in which Tveit was linked to misinformation. Nettavisen required that the response be written within a 200-word limit. Such a requirement is actually quite unnecessary since space is virtually unlimited in an online newspaper, unlike in a printed newspaper. Tveit complied with the requirement and submitted a response of up to 200 words. However, Tveit had assumed that Nettavisen followed a standard counting method where the body text, but not the headline and introduction, is included when counting the number of words. Thus, Nettavisen shortened the response even further.
It turned out that the meaning of the response was also changed. Tveit’s response criticized Nettavisen’s journalism, while the response in edited form looked like a criticism of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI), which it was not intended to be. As if that were not enough, it turned out that the response was not visible to those who visited Nettavisen’s pages. The response could only be accessed through a link that one had to know. For those who read the entire case, it becomes clear that Nettavisen was aware of this.
The case is very close to being journalistic trickery. This and other cases should make one think a little about which media outlets one should invest time in following, those that engage in what can be called journalistic trickery, or at least are close to this, or those that uncover journalistic trickery and other things that should be brought to light.”
The readers of Kvinneguiden did not get much use from the post. After not to many minutes, the post (which had this URL) was removed, and when “Reidar Tomb logged in, he found the following message from the forum administration:
“Hello
This is a reminder that advertisement is not allowed at Kvinneguilden. As your post goes under advertisement, it has been removed. We refer to the forum rules.
As a user of Kvinneguiden, you cannot write posts that violate the following rule
- Advertisement for goods, services or one’s own social meida or websites. It is not allowed to spread affiliate links or recruitment links or recruit followers to one’s social media. It is however allowed to link to one’s own profiles if it is relevant to the topic of the post.
You are encouraged to read the forum’s guidelines again. If you have questions regarding this decision, please contact the team in Private forum messages.”
A natural question is how moderator knew that “Reidar Tomb” had anything to do with Fampo’s website in Norwegian, fampo.info, the website that the moderator found it against the forum rules to link to in the post. Strictly speaking, fampo.info does not belong to any single person, but an organisation. But even if Kvinneguiden links “Reidar Tomb” to the webmaster or editorial staff, we have the following:
In the quoted part of the forum rules, it is said explicitly that one is allowed to link to one’s own profiles if it is of relevance to the topic of the thread. The reader may judge for hinself/herself. The deleted post contains three links to pages on fampo.info covering specific topics. Are these not relevant to the topic of the post? The topic of the thread was dubious sides of Norwegian mainstream media. The three links supported the content of the post in different ways. The first link went to a page where one can study a comprehensive collection of articles criticizing Norwegian media. The second link went to a collection of articles on the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. The third link was especially relevant to the topic of the thread. While the two first links gave useful background on the topic of the tread, the third link went to a page containing at the top of the page the two articles on Nettavisen that were used as an example, and which the post gave a short abstract of. The case is less easy to understand if one does not provide links to the articles together with the abstract, One might say that Reidar Tomb could have linked to the two articles by Kjetil Tveit instead. “Reidar Tomb” did however choose a compact way of linking, where the reader could see the articles together with other critques of Nettavisen.
I choose to add that this is the first time “Reidar Tomb” has got any posts deleted at Kvinneguiden. The irony is that the wrongly, or at least unnecessarily, deleted post showed how media give the audience a wrongful picture of reality. And this was what readers of Kvinneguiden did not get the opportunity to study.
On Thursday January 15, Reidar Tomb made a new attempt to write about this important theme – the dark side of Norwegian mainstream media. The post can be seen via a screenshot here. One cannot read the post at Kvinneguiden’s website, as it appears to have been deleted. I linked to the post before it became deleted at my personal X account, so I have the link, and this is the link. This screenshot was taken at Kvinneguiden when Reidar Tomb was logged in. It displays his latest forum activity, with the newest posts/replies on the top. On cannot find the post Reidar Tomb wrote on January 15, so one can safely assume that it has been deleted. In contrast to when the first post was removed, “Reidar Tomb” was not able to notice a message from the forum administration that it had been deleted, followed by an explanation. This time, Kvinneguiden could not easily have argued that Reidar Tomb violated forum rules by “advertising” for a website that anyone could call “his”.
One can conclude that we have an interesting example of someone not wanting people to read the media criticism by Kjetil Tveiut and others.
Fampo 