Sweden has given us so many great things: meatballs, Volvo, ABBA, a perfectly acceptable style of massage. But not even “Dancing Queen” can top the sheer delight that is the official Sweden Twitter account.
In 2011, the Swedish Institute did the unthinkable: It let a new Swede handle the account each week with free rein. The idea was to show the variety of what the country has to offer, and the result was one of Twitter’s best shitposting accounts of all time. Sadly, though, the account became inactive as of September 2018, and because of Twitter’s policy of removing any account that hasn’t been used in over a year, it plans to shut down @Sweden by the end of the month.
This, of course, is devastating news. But not so devastating that it prevented me from screengrabing some of the account’s most iconic tweets for posterity:
Admittedly, toward the end of its run, the account was used in a more straightforward way, often teaching followers about all the lovely things Sweden has to offer, like Cinnamon Roll Day and complicated language rules. Yet in its most chaotic moments, we learned less wholesome but inarguably valuable lessons, like the secret to getting good at fellatio and the fact that Chatroulette has significantly fewer cocks than it once did.
Then there was Jack, the man who infamously became known as the “Masturbating Swede” after candidly tweeting about jacking off from the account in 2011. Those really were simpler times.
Thank you for your service, Jack. And thank you, Sweden. We’re glad the entire population of your country has had a chance to tweet in your honor. We just really hope IKEA isn’t run the same way.
Tatiana Tenreyro
Tatiana Tenreyro is a contributing writer at MEL and has written for the A.V. Club and SPIN, living the dream of every plaid-shirted boy she had a crush on in high school.
