Swedish mag tweets job ad seeking anyone but white males - gets reported to Discrimination Ombudsman

Nöjesguiden the hip city magazine tweeted out their hunt for some new film & music reviewers here, archived here, adding "Note: white males declined".

Pretty blunt way to define the type of employee they were looking for, in fact some people called it discrimination and it has now been reported to the "Diskriminerings Ombudsman" in Sweden. In fact, at least fifteen people felt personally discriminated against as that's how many reports the Diskrimeringsombudsman has received so far according to Dagens Media. At least one of the complainers expresses that he feels discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity, as the company "writes explicitly that they do not want to hire people with certain skin color."

The tweet has been removed, and the wanted ad has been changed. Now on twitter you'll instead find this apology of sorts: "Sometimes even the PC-mafia* is interpreted wrong. As everyone knows, NG stands for everyones equal worth, and everyone are welcome to come and write for us." By "PC_mafia" they mean the Politically Correct 'mafia', a term often used for magazines like Nöjesguiden.

Ibland tolkas även PK-maffian fel! Som bekant står NG förstås för allas lika värde, och alla är välkomna att skriva för oss.

— Nöjesguiden (@nojesguiden) November 19, 2015

Jenny Nordlander, the managing editor of Nöjesguiden, called the mishap "a failure of communication."

"The tweet was an attempt to make fun of ourselves, it was an ironic joke that was sadly misunderstood. With the job ad itself, we want to encourage more people to apply to get a wider selection, then obviously we'll assess for competence. There is a certain norm in society made clear when some people do not dare to apply for services which they actually have skills. We want to encourage them to do it."

We'll see if the Diskrimeniringombusdman says about this twitter joke, and how the wanted ad expresses their search for the "not norm". There's even a possibility that since there's specific regulation for job ads, they failed to follow these regulations as well and could be reported to Reklamombudsmannen. Yes, we have an ombudsman for everything, we invented that shit. Also, yes, it's still called an "ombudsman", not ombudsperson.