Twenty years of digital ID. The debate is still anonymous.
A democratic conversation doesn’t require everyone to show ID. Just that everyone is someone.
In three months, Sweden holds a general election. It will be the first where generative AI is expected to play a significant role, and we already know the troll factories aren’t only foreign. Investigative journalism has shown anonymous influence operations run from inside Swedish party offices. Whoever runs them, the method is the same: anonymous accounts at scale, pretending to be many.
I don’t think the problem is what gets said. Democracies are built to survive bad arguments. The problem is that we no longer know who is speaking, or whether anyone is. In the feed, one person and a hundred anonymous accounts look exactly the same.
The infrastructure was never missing
Here’s the strange part. Sweden has had BankID since 2003. Denmark has MitID. These are population-scale identity systems that people trust and use every day, for banking, taxes and healthcare. The EU is now extending the same model to the whole union with the EUDI Wallet, which every member state must offer by the end of 2026, and which banks, telecoms and the largest platforms must accept from late 2027.
But accepting a wallet at login is not the same as a verified public conversation. Nothing in any of this, old or new, obligates a social platform to know that an account belongs to one real person. Denmark launching its wallet doesn’t verify a single comment thread. The identity layer has been sitting there for a generation, and yet the public conversation still happens on platforms where no one can know who is a person.
That’s why we built Inlägg
Inlägg is a Nordic social platform where every account belongs to a verified human, through BankID in Sweden and MitID in Denmark. One person, one account. That makes troll factories practically impossible, whoever runs them.
And verification doesn’t mean showing who you are. You can be anonymous on Inlägg, but only one anonymous. When you verify, your identity is cryptographically pseudonymized in a one-way transformation, which lets us guarantee one person, one account without ever storing who you are.
People tend to assume the choice is between full anonymity and full exposure. There’s a third option: you can hide your name, but you can’t multiply yourself.
What comes next
When EUDI wallets launch across Europe, Inlägg will accept them alongside BankID and MitID. The architecture is the same either way: a state-grade credential proving you’re a single human, pseudonymized at the door.
The Nordics are a good place to prove this model works, because nowhere else do people already trust and use digital identity at this scale. What we learn here is what the rest of Europe will be able to do from 2027.
Inlägg is open to anyone with BankID. Find us at inlägg.se.