Neighbors and age-old rivals, Sweden and Denmark, entered into a full-scale Twitter war, touching most – if not all – of the nerves which have accumulated over the past 400 years.
Denmark.dk is run by the Danish Foreign Ministry, while Sweden.se is the Swedish Institute’s online territory. The two usually post and re-post various pieces of promotional content, but Thursday apparently became the day when chthonian forces broke out.
It all began with this seemingly harmless post in which the Swedes joked about their one inexplicable hatred – wall-to-wall carpeting. It appears that such a fashion of interior decoration did not sit well with the nation in which many view it as unsanitary and just poor taste.
As apparently do the Danes, who reposted the tweet with a caption that read that disgust for wall-to-wall carpets is “just one of many things Danes and Swedes have in common.”
But the Swedes were in a mood for a “chat”.
Everything snowballed from there, with the exchange getting more and more heated as it went from jokes about the size and beauty of the two states...
...to Sweden's pricey alcohol, the traps and pitfalls of the Danish language, from moose...
...to sperm banks and national flags...
...and even world peace and cooperation with the UN.
The vast social media community reacted cautiously, with many bluntly asking what the cause of the fallout had been, if any. Some followers even expressed concerns that Sweden and Denmark were back on track to wars they fought some 400 years ago.
And the puzzle was soon solved by the Swedes.
“The Danes quoted us this morning, we replied to that and then we mutually kept the theme going. We are friends and know that our target audience is entertained by this content,” Ferencz Thuroczy, social media editor for the Swedish Institute, that navigates the Swedish account, told The Local.
Oh well, intrigued no more. Still, it was worth it, was it not?