One of the striking aspects of recent years is how exceptions to stereotypes—e.g., Melbourne doesn’t have a black crime problem — are less and less true. More and more, stereotypes apply everywhere. For example, you might think that Helsinki, Finland would not have any Jussie Smollett-style racial hate hoaxes. But that’s so outdated. Of course Helsinki has hate hoaxes:

From YLE.Fi:

Helsinki city councillor apologises for false story about abusive taxi passenger

11.11.2019 17:26 | updated 11.11.2019 17:26
The SDP politician told daily Helsingin Sanomat that he had circulated an untrue story because he “was angry”.

Social Democratic Party politician and Helsinki city councillor Abdirahim “Husu” Hussein has admitted to fabricating a story about removing a passenger from his taxi after being verbally attacked. …

About one week ago, Hussein tweeted about an incident in which he claimed that he had stopped along a motorway to order a verbally abusive passenger to leave his taxi. He later modified the story to clarify that he left the passenger at a bus stop and not at the roadside.

At the time Hussein wrote that among other things, the passenger told him to go back to Somalia to defend his country. Later, in a blog post, Hussein provided additional details about the incident and described the individual as asking about his background and reasons for being in Finland.

On Monday Hussein told daily Helsingin Saonmat that while he did have “a man behaving in a racist manner” in his taxi, he did not remove the passenger from the vehicle. He said that he tweeted about the incident to spark discussion about the harassment that taxi drivers face.

“I wrote the tweet on Sunday because I was angry,” he said.

Story falls apart under scrutiny

Hussein’s taxi operator, Taksi Helsinki, said it had looked into the incident and found that his story did not match up with GPS data from the taxi. On Monday, the firm tweeted that no passengers had been asked to leave a taxi.