Ever wonder what it feels like for your native country to hate you? Well, PewDiePie has an idea.

Sweden (yes, the entire country) is currently in hot water on social media. The Swedish Institute is currently receiving lots of backlash when it was discovered that thousands of users had been put on a ‘hate list’ and blocked by the official Swedish Twitter account. Among others, that list included none other than YouTuber and native Swede PewDiePie.

Say whaaaat?

Here’s a little background: although the Twitter account is operated by the Swedish Institute, the person behind the tweets actually changes a lot. According to We The Unicorns:

“The account is run by a different Swedish citizen every week, meaning the content and tone of the account has the potential to drastically change every seven days. Users also have the right to block other accounts as they wish, and the latest owner decided to use that power in a major way, creating a huge block list.” Allegedly this list was compiled based on their political views, specifically being against Swedish immigration policies.

PewDiePie also got into some trouble himself earlier in the year, which probably didn’t help things. The YouTuber was dropped by Disney after a compilation came out of all the anti-semitic jokes and Nazi imagery that PewDiePie includes in his videos. (More on that here.)

The aftermath

When users found out they had been blocked, many reacted quite strongly. (Which is understandable, isn’t it?) Forgetting that different citizens run the account each week, many people appeared to think that the Swedish Government had placed the users on some sort of official blacklist. Nope. Just one power-hungry Swede who obviously isn’t a PewDiePie fan. PewDiePie himself hasn’t commented publicly about the blocking yet, but we assume his initial reaction was something like this:

“Whoops, sorry about that!”

Reports say that all users have now been unblocked. The Swedish Institute was also quick to issue an apology to everyone affected by the situation:

We think Sweden might be in the market for one, consistent social media manager. Anyone out there speak Swedish?