Sweden declares war on Donald Trump over penis joke (on Reddit anyway)

Members of the r/Sweden sub-community on popular website Reddit have declared war on r/The_Donald, another community where supporters of Presidential hopeful Donald Trump discuss the current frontrunner for the Republican Party's nomination.

It began with a member of r/The_Donald pointing out that Sweden looks like a penis. It escalated into an all-out assault from the predominately Swedish members of r/Sweden (which calls itself Sweddit) on their rival's subreddit and Trump himself once they found out about the initial post.

Posts included this gif mocking overweight Americans (warning: some NSFW language), memes based on Swedish Chef from the Muppets, and the King of Sweden with Trump in a headlock. These began to grow in popularity as the two communities took aim at one another.

The people of r/The_Donald took another approach to the perceived "war", spamming the Swedish community with posts as well as attacking Sweden on its own site. The top post from the past 24 hours (at the time of writing) was from someone hoping to spread a list of Sweden's Most Wanted from Interpol, apparently believing it to be a list of the most wanted Swedish people and not a list of the Sweden's most wanted criminals.

A mod on r/The_Donald also posted to say that the subreddit's "No Racism" rule would "no longer be enforced at all with regards to the middle east". The post was eventually deleted, but was screengrabbed for posterity. A later post from another mod said the "No Racism" was never removed, but added that "we're only allowing Islamophobia".

In response a mod on r/Sweden reminded users that "r/sweden is a welcoming, multicultural sub where everyone should feel at home." By the end of the day, and the apparent end of the internet war, the Swedes were feeling pretty happy about their work but mods decided to shut the subreddit down for a brief period to allow things to cool off. The subreddit returned earlier this morning (15 April).

"What started as a light-hearted rebuttal grew much more popular than we anticipated," read the post. "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."