Last week, Reddit user mengameng uploaded a rather NSFW photo of Sweden to the /r/TheDonald page, depicting the country as a male genital. “Let’s make this image the first thing people see when they search google for Sweden,” read the image’s caption. And needless to say, the Swedes were none too pleased.
The situation quickly escalated, with posts becoming increasingly nasty on both sides. There was a gif mocking overweight Americans, Swedish Chef memes, and images of Sweden’s leaders in rather compromising positions. Soon, it was an all-out flame war of the digital persuasion.
Members of the r/The_Donald community began to inundate the Swedish community with spam, and a moderator on r/The_Donald decided to announce that its community’s “No Racism” rule would “no longer be enforced at all with regards to the middle east.” It was unclear if r/The_Donald are aware that Sweden is not, in fact, in the Middle East.
Refusing to sink to the same level, a mod on r/Sweden noted, “r/sweden is a welcoming, multicultural sub where everyone should feel at home.”
Ultimately, the Swedish community shut itself down, recognizing that things had gone too far. In a post explaining its brief closure, the community posted, “What started as a lighthearted rebuttal grew much more popular than we anticipated. At this point, the current joke has run its course and we’re seeing a lot of low-effort content that is no longer relevant to r/Sweden being spammed in the /new queue. We want to avoid that in order to retain our standards so we can continue delivering quality content in the future. Today, we made Sweddit great again, but tomorrow is a new day so let us get back to the relevant Swedish content.”
