Borås was portrayed as the world's worst place: "It was good for the city"

The hashtag Borås has over 300 million views.

There are lots of strange and horrible clips - burning churches, sinkholes, rats that have taken over.

The pictures don't come from Borås for real - so why was Borås in particular portrayed as the world's worst place?

City manager Svante Stomberg admits that it rains quite a lot in Borås, but thinks the city has an undeserved bad reputation.

- A lot of people don't know Borås to such a great extent, and that makes this kind of phenomenon spin, he says.

"There will only be bad news about Borås"

His namesake, 15-year-old Svante, posted the Tiktok clip that became the first of many Borås jokes on the platform.

He himself has only been to Borås once but says that there is only bad news about the city.

"You don't know what happens there apart from strange and horrible things," writes the 15-year-old in a text message to Kulturnyheterna.

To manage the crisis, the municipality created a Tiktok account where they posted their own clip, where city manager Svante Stomberg showcased Borås' public art.

- We wanted to deliver a counter-image and tickle a bit and say "come here and look and you will see how nice it is".

"All attention is good attention"

The municipality's clip has over 160,000 views on Tiktok, while the 15-year-old's dystopian clip has 4.3 million.

Despite that, Svante Stomberg does not think that the city's brand has taken too much of a beating.

- No, I think most people who were on Tiktok understood that this was a joke.

They say that all the attention is good and I still think this was pretty good for Borås after all.